OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Brian McDermott

Amherst, Massachusetts

In September 2009, Brian joined the journalism faculty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst full-time. He teaches classes in photojournalism, video journalism, web design, and writing for the web.

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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

Can Bottled Water Save Journalism Online?

November 17, 2009
The October 20 survey was depressing and unsurprising news. Approximately 1,820 Brits out of 2,000- that’s 91 percent- told Lightspeed Research that they would never pay for news online.

“Online it should be free,” said 19-year-old Shauna O’Brien, an economics major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In the fatalistic gloom of the news industry, Shauna’s words and the British survey reinforce what a long string of failures, from Times Select to Salon Premium, have shown anecdotally: people just won’t pay for web news. Paired with stubbornly low online ad revenues and a high demand for news online, many news organizations find themselves cornered into a budgetary free-fall. The conventional wisdom is that changing this equation is impossible.

Perhaps. But could there be a lesson from something Shauna O’Brien does pay for?

Shauna buys a five-dollar pack of bottled water every few weeks. “My family has been buying water forever,” she said. In that the O’Briens have a lot of company: bottled water is a 12 billion dollar per year industry in 2009, double its size in 2000. Tap water, of course, is free, and available almost universally in the U.S. In taste tests, people often can't tell the bottled brand from the tap.

So how are these companies making so much money? Does the bottled water industry have any lessons for online journalism? More...

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