Philly.com planning to charge for online content by end of year

Posted by Emma Heald on June 3, 2009 at 10:28 AM

Philly.com will probably start charging for content by the end of 2009, its owner Brian Tierney told Fox 29, a local Fox TV affiliate, on its 'Good Day Philadelphia' show. Philadelphia Media Holdings owns the Inquirer and the Daily News as well as the city news website.

"I think by the end of this year we'll starting doing what a lot of other newspapers are looking at doing and charging something for it," Tierney said. "We can't spend $53 million on newsroom costs and give it away on the back door in terms of things. There will be a small charge for that." He added that "I think we have the value there that people would be willing to pay."

Tierney said that he also plans to look at trying to get money from Google for his company's content that is displayed on the search engine's site. This is an issue which has been frequently discussed by publishers recently, and start-up company Attributor has joined with a group of publishers to create the Fair Syndication Consortium, which aims to help publishers receive a cut of advertising revenue generated on sites that reproduce their content.

Tierny dismissed the idea of going online-only, insisting that his company needed print journalists to be profitable and adding that he expected to be printing newspapers for the next 20 years. He said that 1.6 million people buy the Sunday edition of the Inquirer, and another 1 million read it online.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which just celebrated its 180th birthday, has already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, owing $300 million to investors, but Tierney seemed to remain optimistic about his company. Observer journalist Paul Harris is not so optimistic, contemplating in a recent article whether Philadelphia might "be the place where the American newspaper dies." Another Philadelphia daily, The Bulletin, folded earlier this week.

Will charging for content be able to help prevent any of America's cities being left without a newspaper? Many publishers such as News Corp and MediaNews Group are currently investigating the possibility, and start-up Journalism Online, which aims to facilitate charging for online content, presented its services to a group of newspaper executives in Chicago last week. Across the Atlantic, News Corp-owned The Sunday Times just announced that is considering a paywall. It remains to be seen exactly how it will work, but it is becoming increasingly clear that not all general news online content will be free within the next few months.

Source: MyFoxPhilly.com