Tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad may allow the news industry a “re-set” and to start charging for content after years of giving it away for free, a senior News Corp executive said on Friday.
News Corp chief digital officer Jon Miller also said it was too early to make any judgments about the experiment of News Corp’s the Times with a paid Web site, but charging online readers was “an idea whose time has come.”
“A year ago, we were pretty out front with the idea that content has value,” Miller told an audience of top technology and media executives at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado.
Now, he said, “it’s accepted at a variety of levels. It’s more about how it gets done.”
News Corp’s Wall Street Journal already charges a subscription fee for full access to WSJ.com and News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has said he eventually plans to charge online readers of all of the titles in his newspaper stable.
Britain’s Financial Times also charges Web readers and the New York Times plans to start charging at the beginning of next year.
“Dual revenue streams are good businesses,” Miller said of a combination of subscription fees and online advertising.
He said tablet computers, such as the iPad, offer great opportunities for news organizations to develop paid applications.
“You see apps being consumed that are paid-for apps,” Miller said.
“I think we’re seeing a fundamental shift in where content is consumed and it’s on to these kinds of devices,” he said. “These tablets are heavy media consumption devices, much more than the Web by itself and even smartphones.”
The News Corp executive said the iPad and other tablets being developed offer “very media rich experiences that I think do allow a re-set, perhaps a do-over for the media industry, a chance to get it right.”
Consumers need to understand that “there is investment being made in this content,” he said.
Miller acknowledged that erecting a pay barrier around a newspaper Web site did result in some loss of readership.
“You lose unique visitors when you do that, unquestionably,” he said, but they tend to be those who “dip in and dip out.”
“What you do retain are your more core users,” he said.
Miller said charging online may not be the way to go for every news outlet.
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