News media blocked by pay walls

This week, CNN released an application for the iPhone with a $1.99 price tag attached, which begs the question – will the world’s mainstream media outlets ever learn?

Haven’t we been through this before with major media outlets attempting to charge us for the same information that we can get from so many other place for free?

For better or for worse, the news media cannot really go back. The door to free content was opened long ago, and nothing is going to help close it.

And yet, even though this is a subject that has been discussed, debated and beaten dead, they keep coming back to the well with hopes it is not as dry as it was last time.

CNN argues that its application is so much better than the applications from the likes of MSNBC, The New York Times and the Associated Press that we should have to pay for it.

However, it is hard to imagine that CNN’s general stories on the application will be as interesting as those from the Times or the AP and it doesn’t have as many crazy personalities as MSNBC.

CNN’s app decision comes on the heels of three other news media outlets throwing up pay walls over the past week. In an even more expensive move, the Wall Street Journal announced that it will begin charging $2 per week for the use of its mobile application.

Though that could make sense considering the WSJ’s successes at getting its readers to pay for digital content in the past, the publication abandoned that strategy nearly two years ago.

Early last week it was reported that the entertainment industry’s trade publications, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, were both considering pay walls for content as well.  

Obviously, these major news outlets have to try something. We’ve all heard the dire stories about the death of the newspaper, dwindling advertising revenues and depleted newsrooms. Moves like this are completely revenue based, but I think everyone knows what the news media is trying to do – it’s the why and how that confounds us.

With a recent study by the American Press Institute finding that nearly 60 percent of newspapers are strongly considering some sort of pay wall or fee system and 22 percent of those newspapers thinking about putting up the wall by the end of 2009, we’re going to see even more of this. 

But for it to work – for people to actually accept pay walls – the news media is going to have to band together. Some have – 1,000 newspapers have signed non-binding agreements to create a fee system under the Journalism Online LLC banner and Google, Microsoft and IBM are on-board for something, too – but all it takes is one major media outlet to undercut the whole thing.

And in a today’s media-excessive world, a competitive advantage might be more crucial than the revenue and subsequent backlash that comes along with pay walls.