It’s encouraging that people are trying to think creatively abou the broken publishing model, which I mentioned on this site in my March 11 post, “Everyone’s A Writer.” After all, who’s going to cover the arts and publish reviews and criticism if not newspapers and magazines?
Turning newspapers into non-profits (on purpose, that is) is one; micro-payments for using online news sites is another.
Here’s another, by Dan Gillmor, posted earlier this week on BoingBoing. Gillmor argues that a critical mass of elite journalism organizations — from the New York Times to the Economist to the New Yorker — should band together and charge readers for access to their websites. Only after a few days would the content become free.
The implementation problems are obvious: someone would pay for the content and put it up online free elsewhere. Sure, that violates copyright laws, but it happens all the time.
But Gillmor’s “thought experiment,” as he calls it, may at least generate more thinking. It’s worth reading.