American media gears up to charge for online news

As the double whammy of a financial crisis and a shrinking print readership is making journalism less lucrative in US, a growing number of publications in the country are mulling to charge their online readers to make a buck.

Certain publications like the Wall Street Journal and Newsday already charge for online articles, and New York Times will be doing so shortly. Now, the NY Times reports that other newspapers are following suit. "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,"the Times wrote.

Steven Brill, an entrepreneur working on the requisite software that would allow media outlets to charge their readers, told the daily that it would take a long time before charging Internet users would

fix the economic woes of the deeply troubled industry. "As newsprint becomes a smaller part of the business, you want to establish the notion that it's worth something online," Brill said. "What we have convinced people of is they don't have to make a drastic decision. You can experiment."  

A noted American political journalist, Michael Kinsley wrote in The Atlantic, a Boston-based magazine, the reason why readers in the US are abandoning print has less to do with technology and more to do with how newspaper articles
are written.

"It's that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don't add to your understanding of the news," according to Kinsely."Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory," he added.