More video for online newspaper sites?

For many years now, news organizations have broadly made content free to online readers and viewers. It's one of the reasons that the traditional newspaper business has run into so much trouble over recent years. Now that more people than ever consume their news online, the dead-tree version is becoming less relevant. Also, a newspaper is going to be make much less money showing a banner ad on a website than it is from displaying a full page ad in a paper.

However, one media mogul seems set on changing the current dynamic. According to a report in today's New York Post (a Murdoch paper), Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is examining ways to charge internet readers for content:

"In one of the most ambitious online undertakings by a media outfit, News Corp. has assembled a team of executives to devise a system to charge for content on the Web.

The team is said to be looking at creating a user-friendly device akin to Amazon's Kindle to deliver content from such News Corp. newspapers as The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and The New York Post, as well as content from the company's television and movie units."

You can read the full article here

The upside to all the newspaper industry woes is that it means traditional publications are on the hunt for ways to make their website content stand out from the rest. Some leading newspaper conglomerates have already starting including multi-media content on their sites - good news for the kinds of multi-skilled journalists who read this blog; bad news for scribes who just write and are now sadly losing their jobs.

In the News Corp example, clearly a media group of that size already has TV resources that can be tapped to provide content to online platforms - and it's going to need to harness those resources if it's going to be able to charge for content. A fee site needs some serious added value to successfully attract people away from free sources of online news.

But for smaller newspaper groups, or ones that are not already in the television and video business, they are going to need to compete here. If Murdoch is right, and pricing for online news content is the future, then online news content is going to have to catch up with the present first. And that means more video - a lot more.