How is Paid Content Going to Impact Your Local Paper and Your Obit…

We’re just days away from seeing Journalism Online‘’s system put into action with several newspapers. Journalism Online is a relatively new start-up venture aiming to facilitate newspapers’ efforts to charge online.

Here is a link to the full story , and I could not resist putting an excerpt from the story here, “”We’re starting small, so if this really turns people off, we’re not playing with a huge chunk of our readership,” Schreiber told the Times, reflecting a commonly-held fear among publishers of scaring away readers and losing advertising revenue.  

This small start will only involve charging readers outside the local area and only for reading obituaries, as these are unique to the paper, Schreiber said, adding that local sports might be the next area targeted.”

A green “Press+” logo will appear next to each obituary headline, and after reading a certain amount of such articles, a user will be prompted to pay a flat fee to continue.

Here’s my question, how long are most obits? Is it really a good idea to charge folks who already might be a little bit down about the loss of a friend, family member etc. to read the full obit? Are we really so monetarily driven in this day and age that we have to charge for someone to read a full obituary to help print newspapers stay alive?

Question: Are people going to be creating Twit-obits to save loved ones the expense?

The bigger question is also whether overall this will even work since so much information including news etc. is so freely available on the Web?

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