There’s been much talk lately resurrecting the idea of making news consumers pay for news online, with the idea of micropayments (paying for each article you read, like iTunes) at the center of the current debate. Personally, I don’t think the concept is practical enough to work. For one thing, just the act of having to decide whether or not to buy each article while I do my morning news reading is simply annoying. Yes, I do that when I’m buying songs on iTunes, but I sample far fewer songs than I do news stories each day. Besides, music has ridiculously more replay value than news stories, so even after I hear a clip of a song or even the whole song somewhere else, I would still have a reason to buy it. Not so with news. Micropayments might work in isolated cases, but I don’t think it’ll make a big impact industry-wide.

However, that doesn’t mean I think any news model involving payment by consumers would fail. In fact, I reject the “information wants to be free” notion (see the Wikipedia entry on the phrase to get the entire quote, which casts a very different light on it than “free of charge”). I can believe that information wants to be free in the sense that it is human nature to want to share information with each other. But that does NOT mean information MUST be supplied free of charge. (See the subhead below to see my rant about this).

In discussions about future journalism business models, it has been raised that there are certain types of news content that consumers might be willing to pay for. I’ve seen such content described as that which is “unique and valuable”, but I’ve never really seen anyone point out specific real-life examples of such content. In general, the discussions seem to be much clearer on what consumers would NOT pay for (wire news, opinions) than what they would.

I tried to think about my daily news consumption and what kind of content I would pay for if newspapers did away with the all-free model. What is unique and valuable content to me?

The unique part seems to be pretty easy. After all, every local newspaper that does a decent job of covering its community creates “unique” content that’s not found on the wires or national/international news sites. But “valuable” seems to be a much trickier criterion. In essence, I’m asking, “What kinds of stories would I want to read so much that, if it were behind a paywall, I would be inclined to pull out my credit card instead of just clicking away and going on with life?”

I honestly couldn’t think of anything. Perhaps if there’s a tornado bearing down on my town and there’s a story telling me the details of when and where it might hit, I might pay to read it. Of course, I would be just as inclined to turn on the TV and watch reports about that instead of paying for the newspaper’s story. The news content that I enjoy reading the most each day — journalism and local sports — aren’t so important to me that I would feel empty without them. If I had to pay to read them, I might just spend that time reading other online stuff or, GASP, a book instead. Detailed, in-depth news about my neighborhood? Maybe I’m just anti-social, but I don’t care enough about my neighbors to need to know every time their kids won an award. Searchable databases of information about my town and neighborhood? I honestly can’t think of any reason why I would regularly spend time looking through them. They might be handy when I’m looking to buy a house, but how many houses do people buy in their lifetimes?

So what kind of news content would you be willing to pay for? I’m talking about specific examples, not vague generalities.

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Semi-related rant: Why I don’t buy the “Information wants to be free” argument for free news

It annoys me when people argue that news organizations can’t charge for their content online because “information wants to be free”. There is absolutely no law of nature that says information must be given to consumers for zero cost. The only thing human beings might be entitled to for free is the air we breath, and even then, we would have to pay if we want to get it in scuba-tank form or to pump it into our tires at the gas station. Why? Because we are paying for the material and labor spent in packaging air into a scuba tank or air pump.

When someone writes a news story, what they are doing, in essence, is the same as the people who put air in scuba tanks. They are putting the information in a ready-to-consume form so you don’t have to. Journalists spend 8-10 hours a day turning information into easy-to-consume forms so that their audience doesn’t have to spend 8-10 hours of their day doing the work journalists did in order to catch up on what’s going on in the world. Paying for news is the same as paying for a tank of air — you are buying the labor and time in preparing that information for your consumption.

This doesn’t just apply to news. Information of any kind doesn’t just come into existence on its own. Cell mitosis occurs every moment of our lives, but the information about its occurence didn’t come into existence until a scientist observed it and recorded the observation, and that scientist, most likely, is paid for his work. When a baby is born, the information doesn’t magically find its way into file folders and databases at the county courthouse. Someone has to take the time to record it on a birth certificate, file it away, and enter the information into a database. When you go to your courthouse and pay $10 or however much for a copy of your birth certificate, that’s what you are paying for — the labor it took to record the occurence of an event, without which the information about the event would have simply vanished into the ether.

To think that somehow consumers are inherently entitled to such service without cost is the equivalent of walking into a scuba gear store and demanding a tank of air for free because air is all around us. Now, you may deem a certain packaging of air, or news, as not being good enough to be worth the asking price, or refuse to pay for one company’s service because another company is giving it away for free. Those are issues of quality and supply vs. demand, not evidence of information possessing some inherent property of “freeness”.

If we really take “information wants to be free” to mean that information must cost nothing to the people who consume it, then why stop at free news? Why have schools, colleges, teachers, and professors? Isn’t teaching basically the dissemination of information, much like writing an article? The people doing the teaching don’t own the information they teach, so if information is free, why should we have to pay tuition to receive it? In fact, you can argue that it’s undemocratic for a society to require its people to go to one of these information-dissemination institutions for years and pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to be allowed access to a commodity that should be free before they can find decent employment. That’s a much bigger racket than making people pay a couple hundred bucks a year for a newspaper.