Analyzing a new plan to charge for news

Ken Doctor has the best analysis I’ve seen so far about a new company called Journalism Online — backed by folks like Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz, Merrill Brown and others — that aims to roll out a common platform for charging people to consume news content. Haven’t we tried this before? Well, desperate times call for desperate measures (see today’s story that Q1 revenue for newspapers could fall as much as 30 percent.) Doctor makes some very good points all around, including the trepidation by media companies to bring in a middleman as well as the complexities of how this would mesh with the Associated Press. By the way, I personally don’t believe a pay-for-content model could be successfully applied to local news on the web. But post your thoughts below…