David Simon to NYT, WP: Make Web Readers Pay Now!

Yet another call for making viewers pay for online journalism -- this time from David Simon in the current Columbia Journalism Review.

Simon is the Baltimore Sun reporter-turned-TV producer (Homicide, The Corner, The Wire) who offered Congressional testimony in May on the sad state of affairs in the newspaper business. Back then, his solution was for newspapers to pursue a non-profit model. Now he's singing a different tune.

His thought-provoking article, "Build the Wall," acknowledges that most readers won't pay for news, but if the industry moves quickly, perhaps enough will.

Simon specifically addresses New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth.

Content matters. And you must find a way, in the brave new world of digitization, to make people pay for that content. If you do this, you still have a product and there is still an industry, a calling, and a career known as professional journalism. If you do not find a way to make people pay for your product, then you are—if you choose to remain in this line of work—delusional.

He offers a bold all-or-nothing blueprint:

On a specific date in the near future—let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it—both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees. Either you believe that what The New York Times and The Washington Post bring to the table every day has value, or you don’t.

Given that the Times is already surveying its subscribers to find out what they'd be willing to pay to access online content, it seems assured that this is the direction that it will go. The big question, which Simon also addresses, is how will this affect smaller local newspapers? He offers several possible scenarios, some grimmer than others.

In all, a lengthy treatise well worth your time.

Naturally, because of our obsession with videojournalism, we have yet to encounter a financial plan that effectively leverages each newspaper's most unique asset, and so far its only one that can be safeguarded against being devalued by easy reproduction and distribution. If you have given thought to that sort of scheme, we're all ears!

David Simon Blasts Citizen Journalism, Prescribes Non-Profit Newspaper Model

We listened to articulate, qualified, high-minded participants in Sen. John Kerry's subcommittee hearing on the bleak future of journalism this week (as his hometown paper, The Boston Globe, struggles to stay afloat).

One who impressed most was longtime Baltimore Sun cop reporter David Simon, who parlayed his journalism experience into a thriving career as a top TV drama producer. His venerated shows (including HBO's "The Wire") often investigate thorny journalism issues.

As Sen. Kerry noted, newspapers are an "endangered species," and Simon brilliantly took to task both old and new media: "A plague on both their houses... High-end journalism is dying in America."

Simon's reasoned rant was both diagnostic and prescriptive. He shares our disdain for the anti-professional notion of "citizen journalism," which he eloquently lambasted -- and every word is worth savoring:

I’m not making a Luddite argument against the internet and all that it offers. But you do not, in my city, run into bloggers or so-called citizen journalists at City Hall or in the courthouse hallways or at the bars where police officers gather. You don’t see them consistently nurturing and then pressing sources. You don’t see them holding institutions accountable on a daily basis.

Why? Because high-end journalism is a profession. It requires daily full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out. Reporting was the hardest and, in some ways, most gratifying job I ever had.

I’m offended to think that anyone anywhere believes American monoliths, as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives, can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or, for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care who it is they’re lying to or who they’re withholding information from.

Indeed, the very phrase “citizen journalist” strikes my ear as Orwellian. A neighbor who is a good listener and cares about people is a good neighbor; he is not in any sense a citizen social worker, just as a neighbor with a garden hose and good intentions is not a citizen firefighter. To say so is a heedless insult to trained social workers and firefighters.

But Simon also endorsed a solution:

A nonprofit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything the government can do in the way of creating nonprofit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued. And further, anything that can be done to create financial or tax-based incentives for bankrupt or near-bankrupt newspaper chains to transfer or donate unprofitable publications to locally based nonprofits should also be considered.

SEE VIDEO / READ TRANSCRIPT