Tuesday Evening Links > New venture wants you to pay for news; Good Luck!!

A trio of long-time media executives are building a computer system to allow newspapers and magazines to charge for online access, including an all-you-can-read subscription that would allow access to multiple publications, the executives said on Tuesday.
Their company, Journalism Online Inc., aims to supply publishers with ready-made tools to charge Internet fees, an idea that has gained sudden currency as advertising revenue plummets, but whose prospects of success are doubted by many media analysts.

As the company envisions the system, a non-paying reader on a magazine or newspaper site would reach a certain point and see a page asking for payment — the Journalism Online system, operating within the publication’s Web site. But a reader who wanted a subscription to multiple sites would go directly to the new company’s own site.

He said that for the unlimited subscriptions, “we’re playing with a figure of $15 a month.”

The company also plans to negotiate licensing and royalty fees with search engines and news aggregators for the use of the publications’ work, and has retained Mr. Boies’ law firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, for that work.