“It's time for newspapers to stop giving away the store. We as an industry need to start charging for -- or at the very least controlling -- use of our products online,” wrote David Lazarus for the Chronicle.

In all fairness, Lazarus doesn’t seem to be fully convinced by his argument either, agreeing that if newspapers already had found how to monetize their online product they would be doing so right now.

"I would not want to be the first newspaper to decide to charge," said Joel Brinkley, a journalism professor at Stanford University and former New York Times reporter. "Readers would run away. Advertisers would run away."

Indeed, putting up a paywall might blast one of newspapers’ few early-adopted YouTube-like attributes: being open to users – mostly one-way – and encouraging hyperlinking and free flow of web traffic.

Philip Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, believes that the paywall model could work though, but only for a handful of elite newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

For other newspapers, these will have to focus on creating the type of unique content that readers are ready to pay for. "Unfortunately, most newspapers are going in the opposite direction," he observed. "They're cutting back on staff and on the high-quality content that people might pay for."

So is an online paywall for all newspapers realistic?

“For this to work, the entire industry would have to come together and unite in saying that the era of the free online lunch is over,” admits Lazarus. There’s little chance that will happen, as there will always be alternative sources and some newspapers to remain free.

This would also raise legal issues – for those seeking to protect copyright this time around – because a unanimous industry-imposed paywall would be price fixing, violating antitrust laws.

These legal issues don’t seem to stop Lazarus. Faced with this possible violation, and convinced of the importance of the paywall, he proposes that “an antitrust exemption may be the only way that the industry can smoothly make the transition to a digital future.”

This may sound far-fetched, and so far there have been few industry-wide steps in that direction. Whether papers decide to charge for their content or not though, they must work collaboratively and take a stand to protect their valuable work, just as Viacom did.

Source: SF Gate through Poynter.org