Free vs. pay debate heats up

If you follow the media business, the runup to war had nothing to do with politics, weapons inspections or the United Nations. It was all about how much media companies would lose, having to staff up and send correspondents abroad for war coverage, while advertisers would make their product placements scarce. Boo-hoo. But while the cable channels and newspapers lick their wounds, the online news business is better than ever, thanks in no small part to Gulf War II, the Afghanistan conflict, and 9/11.

Forget about the number of dead and wounded. Check out these chart-busters (courtesy of comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings): CNN.com gets 10 million at-work visitors the first week of war, up 58 percent. Yahoo! News had 6.5 million workers, NYTimes.com had 2.8 million and AOL News hit 2.7 million. The BBC site's traffic doubled last Monday, the Guardian saw a 67 percent bump that day, Le Monde's site was up 129 percent and the International Herald Tribune site's up 135 percent. Even star weblogger Salam Pax helped push Blogspot.com traffic up 12 percent.

So is this a time for online news execs to quietly exult, or try to figure out a way to make a few extra bucks on this war thing? That's where things aren't so clean-cut in the long-running free vs. pay debate. On the free side, you've got MSNBC.com, scoring 8.3 million at-work visitors the first week of war, and serving up an eye-popping 10 million video streams on the first Friday of war. CBS MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco says "the number of viewers of video content on the Internet could reach historic levels across the board," and she gives just as many props to the pay video services recently launched by Yahoo (its stock recently hit a 52-week high) and ABCNews.com.

Most incongruous is the unbridled success of The New York Times' Web site -- yes, still free -- and the decision by hobbled AOL Time Warner to hobble online versions of popular mags such as People and Entertainment Weekly by making them available only to print and AOL subscribers. CBS MarketWatch's William Spain writes a glowing report on NYTimes.com, saying "advertisers are also coming aboard in droves, leading to an impressive financial turnaround." But AOL's move to restrict content, according to the New York Post's Keith Kelly, has "rankled some insiders, who see it as diminishing the brand and marketing clout of magazines in another futile attempt to build synergy at the struggling AOL Time Warner behemoth."

It's nice that the press is skeptical of AOL's plans, but why can't critics just tell it like it is? This is a stupid idea that won't work. The pay services that have worked online served a very specific need: The Wall Street Journal's financial news, fantasy sports leagues for hardcore fans, online greeting cards for procrastinators. Even Yahoo knew how to snap up subscribers right out of the gate, offering NCAA tourney video and the war. But vanilla People and Entertainment Weekly content are not going to convert people to become AOL subscribers.

So as the war rages, and workers scan news sites for updates during the day, what's a news exec to do? Start charging for stories or video, and make a quick buck now, and lose an audience for advertisers? Or stick to the free model? Or offer some free, some pay? Right now there are no easy answers, and every site's publisher will have to work out the business model that works for them -- and for their audience.

Their sides to the story

My column on recycled stories looked at similarities in a story in the Scotsman about an Oscar blacklist and a previous story in the New York Post on the same subject. Though I wrote that the Scotsman hadn't responded to my queries, they had indeed responded, but off the record. Now they have gone on the record, and deputy editor William Peakin wrote in an email: "It is correct to say that the quote from Tom O'Neil in our article was taken from the Post story and Annette [Witheridge] acknowledges that it should have been attributed. Beyond that, while the two articles deal with the same subject they are -- as one blogger you quote points out -- substantially different. However, the issue your article raises is a valid one which needs to be appreciated by reporters."

On my column on wartime censorship online, I wrote about Internet hosting service Vortech pulling the YellowTimes.org site because it ran grisly photos of dead soldiers (taken from Al Jazeera). The service issued a public statement, which reads, in part: "Vortech, Inc. received numerous complaints from both our upstream service provider and many other independent parties regarding violent, graphic adult content publicly posted at YellowTimes.org residing on our Web server. We contacted YellowTimes.org and asked them to please remove the graphic material, as it was in violation of our Terms of Service. YellowTimes.org chose to ignore our request; therefore their account was suspended. The content in question depicted graphic photographs of U.S. prisoners of war in Iraq as well as pictures of recently deceased U.S. soldiers and wounded or dead Iraqi children. The photographs contained clearly identifiable features of the deceased with no regard to the loved ones of the U.S. servicemen and women. The Web site also had no visible means of protection or warning to those viewers under the age of 18.

"In these volatile times of war our Terms of Service are intended to take into account the interests of our client base (that would prefer not to see graphic depictions of dead/mutilated soldiers or children) as well individuals who might be personally affected (such as families/loved ones of wartime casualties). Companies and/or individuals that choose to utilize our services are held accountable to our Terms of Service and any breach of contract would entail the termination of service. We would also like to make it clear that this decision is not of a political nature."

What do you think? Please use the forum at the side of this column to give your viewpoint on wartime censorship or other issues raised in this column.