Publisher Lays Out Plan to Save Newspapers

When Axel Springer, the founder of the German newspaper publishing business bearing his name, laid the cornerstone in 1959 for a high-rise headquarters in Berlin only steps away from the tense line separating East from West, people called him crazy, arrogant or both.

While the Berlin Wall has come and gone, Springer executives are looking into another ideologically divided realm — cyberspace — with a similarly stubborn mien.

Springer, which publishes the biggest daily in Europe, the tabloid Bild, as well as other newspapers in Germany and Eastern Europe, says it wants publishers to get paid for their work on the Internet, at a time when many people assume that online news should be free.

“The meta-philosophy of free — we should get rid of this philosophy,” said Christoph Keese, Springer’s head of public affairs and an architect of its online strategy. “A highly industrialized world cannot survive on rumors. It needs quality journalism, and that costs money.”

Springer is not the only publisher looking for ways to earn money from digital sources, as readers turn away from printed newspapers and the promise of Internet advertising fades. In the English-speaking world, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corp., has been telling anyone who will listen that he plans to erect so-called pay walls for his company’s newspaper Web sites. Other publishers, including The New York Times Co., which owns the International Herald Tribune, have also said they were considering charging for online access.

But while newspaper companies elsewhere have generally been vague about their intentions, Mr. Keese, during an interview at Axel Springer’s headquarters in Berlin, provided a detailed overview of the company’s digital ambitions.

Instead of separate pay walls around individual newspaper Web sites, Mr. Keese wants publishers and Internet companies to work together to create a “one-click marketplace solution” for their online content. In that system, Google or other Internet gateways would display links to newspaper articles, videos and other content from a variety of providers, as search engines do now. But some of the items would include something new: a price tag.

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Tags: digital sources, international herald tribune, internet advertising, internet companies, new york times, new york times co, news corp, pay-wall, quality journalism

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