Why the NYT is right to be charging online

Steve Brill crunches all the numbers and says just $2 per month per unique visitor would pay fantastic returns.

Oh, The Big Money agrees.

Take THAT, Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, and other people, like perhaps Bora, who think the online pay model is wrong. (And, maybe I overly stereotyped Mr. Rosen's views, in part as a deliberate caricature. I don't think I got them 100 percent wrong.)

Jay, you can diversify content all you want. But, any company that still relies on an advertising-only model to try to make money off that is run by schmucks.

Let's add to that. A Columbia Journalism Review story last year said that in a typical larger metro area (Baltimore was sampled in depth) the traditional newspaper still breaks 60 percent or more of the news. Next is TV, then radio. "New media"? Even in a halfway-techie area like Baltimore, it's still below 5 percent.

So, if you're still the primary purveyor, you have more incentive to charge, charge, charge.

Where media analysts of the "free Internet" stripe (and the more clueless old media moguls like Dean Singleton) miss the boat can best be illustrated by an analogy.

If Campbell's started selling its condensed soup in plstic screw-top bottles, while still selling in cans, and said it wouldn't charge for it because it could spit out soup much faster this way, we'd grab all the Campbell's we could while laughing at its stupidity.

As for the AP, more than a decade ago, buying into the "TV model"? That ignored newspapers themselves charging for circulation. In the TV world, it ignored cable, let alone premium cable.