Free NYT + Free WSJ = Free Fed Info?
Submitted by dcornwall on Fri, 2007-11-23 08:23.
While we haven't been great at generating comments, I wanted to toss out a discussion topic and see where it goes.
As I hope many of you know, the New York Times has dropped subscriber charges and the uber-capitalist Wall Street Journal will follow suit in the next few months. The NYT found they were losing more in ad revenue than gaining in subscriptions. New WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch is on record saying that ad revenue is where the money is.
What, if anything, does the death of premium subscriptions for propriety content, mean for electronic federal information that gets sold? Not just the GPO Sales program, but NTIS, PACER, so-called cooperative publications and the rest? What is their future? Do they have one? At least the NYT and WSJ had copyrighted materials they could defend. With some exceptions, federal information is public domain. Once you get it out of a paid system, you can use it how you want. It's not quite that easy since a few federal fee-based databases are licensed, but it's mostly true.
We at FGI think there is answer -- that selling federal information, aside from being an affront to the taxpayers who paid for the the first time, will not be viable. It wasn't when GPO tried it in the early 1990s and it won't be now. Eventually fee-based gov't information will need to be provided freely, like NYT and WSJ. Though without the ads. It's not inevitable, but even the market seems like it may be trending that way. What do you think?
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But advertising is not allowed
I agree that it is wrong for the government to charge for online access to content paid for by tax dollars.
However, for government programs not funded by appropriated funds, they cannot replace user fees with ad revenues. There are limits on government communications; agencies are not allowed to endorse or promote non-government organizations or products, with only a few exceptions. So I doubt government websites will be looking to online ad revenues any time soon.
Not thinking about ad revenues
Coby,
Your comments are well taken, but I want to make it clear that I'd oppose commercial advertising on government web sites. The main point I was making with the WSJ & NYT posts is that directly charging for information content with minimal value add (i.e. like news) is likely a dying model, assuming it was ever really viable.
I think there are services like LEXIS, etc that do add value to the material they have, including incredibly precise searching and added tagging that will continue to keep sites like that in business.
But even if the subscription model were viable, I believe that the Government has an obligation to provide no-fee access to fully functional government information.
Thanks for stopping by and adding to the conversation!
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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.
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