Newsday Charging for Content We Already Pay For

Saying theywill “end the distribution of free content,” the folks at Cablevision  are planning to charge for Newsday’s online site. 

Cablevision, which bought Newsday last May for $650M and this week took a $402M write-down of that purchase, says it will start charging Newsday users online, but didn’t give specific timetable or details.

Said Cablevision COO Tom Rutledge:

“Our goal was and is to use our electronic network assets and subscriber relationships to transform the way news is distributed…We plan to end the distribution of free Web content.”

Interesting, since anyone who pays a broadband bill knows the internet is not free. In fact we’ve all been subscribing to this content for years through our ISPs, whether they be AOL in the early days (when AOL subsequently paid fees to news organizations to show headlines) or today’s $30 a month paid by Cablevision Internet subscribers to access Newsday and YouTube.

The fact that ISPs like Cablevision get our money while publishers like Newsday don’t see any of this is why the model is broken. Indeed, Cablevision only need to look at the television side, where a portion of subscribers’ basic cable bills go to licensing fees paid to the likes of CNN and ESPN. 

The bottom line is newspapers do indeed have to restrict access to their sites to survive, but not with the failed B-to-C fees model. That model barely works for the Wall Street Journal, mainly because it is an accepted write-off and/or a company expense. And dont’ even mention Isaacson’s micropayments madness.

Publishers instead need to mirror the B-to-B  model of cable television and block ISPs that don’t pay licensing fees. Consider this: Even the ‘publishers’ of Dora the Explorer got another $40M out of Time Warner Cable for rights to their content.

The television folks were well ahead of their newspaper peers on this one.