Media & Communications Law
American Lawyer Founder: Use Blogger ‘Parasites’ As NYT Sales Force
Posted Feb 9, 2009, 01:01 pm CST
By Debra Cassens Weiss
The founder of American Lawyer and Court TV has written a once-confidential memo to the New York Times advising the newspaper to stop giving away its content for free.
The Romenesko blog at Poynter Online obtained the memo from an anonymous source and got confirmation from Brill that he was indeed the author. “I have been thinking about a way to take some of the contrarian thinking that made me try The American Lawyer and Court TV way-back-when and apply it to a new business model to save the New York Times and journalism itself,” Brill writes in the memo.
“Now that the Times has done so much so well to build its online offerings it's time to turn the dynamics around—by getting paid for that content, while using the Internet to eliminate the huge costs of producing and delivering it,” Brill says. “The Internet should be a publisher's dream, not nightmare.”
Brill proposes that the Times charge readers 10 cents per article or an annual fee of $55. And he proposes a tag line to promote the cost: “An Old-fashioned Tradition is Back: Read the Times for 15 Cents a Day."
Blogs that generate readers would get 5 percent of initial customer payments. “Thus, the Times would turn its current parasites into a sales force,” Brill said.
Brill recently made the same point about free content in an interview with the American Journalism Review. “The press has to stop committing suicide by giving journalism away for free,” he said. “Start charging for it, start believing in your product."
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