Ready, Aim, Charge!

Richard Perez-Pena just out at NYT site with new take on news outlets "ready" to charge for online access. It focuses on the Steve Brill/Gordon Crovitz consortium, and visits a couple of small papers ready to take the plunge, including one in Lancaster, Pa. and the Web site Global Post out of Boston. Excerpt:

Specifically, head to the offices of The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era , one of the first handful of news outlets to acknowledge in interviews that it intends, in the next few months, to start using a software system developed by the entrepreneurs Steven Brill, L. Gordon Crovitz and their partners, which they are calling Press+. Others interested include The Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina and Global Post, an Internet site based in Boston.

A very small number of news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Newsday, already charge online readers, each with a system developed largely in-house, and The New York Times announced recently that it planned to do the same. But with advertising plummeting, many other publishers eager for a new source of revenue are considering making the switch, despite the risk of losing audience and advertising.

Last year, Mr. Brill and company seized on that interest, founding their operation, Journalism Online, with the aim of developing a highly flexible system that would become the industry standard, and keeping 20 percent of their client’s online revenue as their fee

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