Joined by two other media heavyweights, the man who created Court TV has launched a venture that could bring much-needed revenues to the embattled newspaper and magazine industry.
Steven Brill, who also started American Lawyer Magazine; L. Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal; and Leo J. Hindery Jr., former head of Global Crossings and the YES Network, have started Journalism Online LLC.
They are being advised by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, two lawyers who were on opposite sides of the 2000 Florida recount battle.
Steven Brill
Journalism Online’s goal is to make it easier for publishers to charge for Internet content.
Money gained in this way would help offset significant losses in print advertising revenues, losses that have not been counter-balanced by gains in online advertising.
“We believe Americans know that advertising alone can’t support quality journalism – and the truth is that it never has,” Brill said in a press release announcing the company’s creation.
Journalism Online would create a pay-to-read system that would be used by a wide variety of newspapers and magazines.
Readers would assess a single website and purchase “annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.”
Part of the fees would then go back to the publishers, earning them revenue that they now are losing by giving free access to their websites.
Brill and his colleagues hope to have the site in operation by the fall.
According to The New York Times, no publishers have yet joined in, but “several major newspaper and magazine publishers” are in discussion with the company.
Brill wrote for Harper’s Magazine and New York Magazine while attending Yale Law School. He is also the founder of the defunct Brill’s Content, a magazine that reported on the media.
Crovitz, a graduate of Yale Law and a former Rhodes scholar, oversaw the implementation and growth of the Wall Street Journal’s online edition, one of the few successful subscriber-based online newspaper sites.
Hindery, the managing partner of InterMedia Partners LP and the former CEO of AT&T Broadband, was an adviser and contributor to John Edwards’ presidential campaign. After Edwards dropped out, he became an economics adviser to the Barack Obama campaign.
In announcing Journalism Online, the company founders signaled an interest in negotiating licensing and royalty fees from search engines and other sites that make money by referring readers to newspaper and magazine stories online.
To assist in this effort, the company has brought in Olson and Boies, who battled the argument over the 2000 Florida vote all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Olson successfully represented George W. Bush and then served as U.S. solicitor general in Bush’s first term.
Boies represented Vice President Al Gore. Earlier in his career, he had been counsel to the Justice Department in its antitrust suit against Microsoft.
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