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Also on hand was Steve Brill, founder of CourtTV, American Lawyer, and Brill’s Content, to pitch a monetizing operation he launched a couple of months ago, Journalism Online, in order to offer news operations a “common platform” where news can be bought and paid for. Here’s a report on that, with plenty of links, followed by public comment that skews in the direction of “what’s Brill smoking?” Brill says he already has a couple of antitrust lawyers lined up — David Boies, who led the federal antitrust suit against Microsoft, and Ted Olson, former solicitor general under George W. Bush.
“The traditional bedrock of American journalism stands at a precipice,” it begins. “Whole swaths of the American populace have abandoned newspapers or are growing up without the habit of reading them, yet the Web sites of news organizations attract more readers than ever. The problem is that the online business model does not yet come close to compensating for the steep slide in the print business model that it is replacing.”
And in conclusion… “What It Takes: Industry-wide collaboration. News companies don’t have the capacity to fly solo.”
