Saving the Fourth Estate

It's undeniable that the going rate for information on the internet is "free." That's meant big trouble for newspapers, which have seen nearly all of their traditional roles usurped by better, faster, free online services over the past few years. If a newspaper doesn't make its content available gratis on the Web, it's irrelevant. If it does, it's got nothing left to sell but fishwrap and inkstains.The Wall Street Journal's publisher Les Hinton has called Google a "digital vampire," but even his paper, one of the last holdouts of subscription-based online content, has made its articles' full text accessible via Google searches. Using free content as bait for paying customers doesn't work for newspapers. And the revenue from internet advertising is less a stream than a dribble — nowhere near enough to support a robust paper (or paperless paper) on its own.Still, there's a crucial distinction that might yet save news organizations. Users are pretty clearly uninterested in paying for content on the open internet, but what they are, in practice, willing to pay for is mobile content. IPhone apps are already a billion-dollar business. Juniper Research recently reported that mobile music revenues (for downloads, ringtones, ringback tones and the like) were over $11 billion in 2008. And the success of Amazon's Kindle — on which newspaper subscriptions cost anywhere from $6 to $14 a month — points toward a potential lifeline for news organizations.Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlton has noted that The New York Times could give each subscriber a free Kindle for a few months' worth of printing costs. In fact, the Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe recently made a deal with Amazon to sell Kindles at a discount to electronic subscribers outside their print delivery areas.Meanwhile, Hearst Corp. is preparing to launch an e-reader of its own, and Fortune has reported that it will probably have a screen larger than the Kindle's, to approximate the reading experience associated with magazines and newspapers.The ultimate form factor of mobile news might be bigger still: Microsoft recently released a video speculating on the technology of 2019, including an electronic newspaper transmitted onto foldable, touch-sensitive "paper."Of course, any Kindle-like gizmo's web browser makes it capable of getting old-fashioned news for free. But mobile devices can also do one thing that other computers can't — pinpoint their users' location. That means that the wireless news subscribers of the future may be able to get information tailored not just to their interests but to where they're physically standing."We're finding that an increasing number of young people are getting their news from smartphones," says Geeta Dayal, a Ford Foundation Fellow who teaches a class on mobile phones and journalism at University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. "And the more people use their phones to access information, the more they want to know what's happening where they are right now."One possible future of news as a commodity is hyperlocal information — the sort of thing that's already becoming popularized by services like Yelp, whose incarnation as an iPhone app offers directions to nearby restaurants and services, complete with with user reviews.A subscriber to a location-based news service might, for instance, be able to point a mobile phone at a building and instantly have access to its news history, its architectural background, profiles and political donation records of the people who live or work there. Imagine hearing a jackhammer and being able to determine at the touch of a button what's being built or demolished, who owns the property, and how long the noise is going to go on.All that information is still going to be free on the Web, of course — but what hyperlocal news subscribers would be paying for is having the information know where they are. Within a few years, the economics of mobile news could mean that you can find out what's happening on the other side of the world for free, but pay to understand what's happening just around the corner.