Dan Conover says the newspaper publishers' campaign to charge readers for on-line news is a suicide pact.

He says while expecting readers to pay for the professionally created content is reasonable, attempts to force them to pay are "post-rational".

Conover points out flaws, including the fact consumers don't want to pay for news and previous attempts to make them pay have failed. But he says newspaper publishers no longer listen to reason and are determined to plough ahead with paid content.

I'd love to see publishers find a way to make on-line news profitable.  But it is a fantasy.

If Fairfax can only convince a handful of Australian business people to stump up cash to read the highly targeted and immensely useful Australian Financial Review on-line, what chance do other newspaper publishers have?

You need nerves of steel to bet against Rupert Murdoch, but this time, he and the other newspaper owners are going in the wrong direction – readers are not going to pay to read news. And they definitely will not do so while there are free alternatives.

Today The Australian’s Media section ran Readers not averse to paying for online content by Nick Tabakoff. As the headline suggests the story looks at an international study by PricewaterhouseCoopers which found ‘readers could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas’.

Could this be related to the PricewaterhouseCoopers study referred to by Miriam Steffens in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Readers reluctant to pay for online news?

It is.

Now, strictly speaking there’s a thin semantic line between ‘readers being reluctant to pay’ and ‘readers not averse to paying for’. One does not directly contradict the other. But the two headlines are clearly two different interpretations of the same data.

Or as we say in the media, they each have a different spin.

Which is more plausible?

Both Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the owner of The Australian and Fairfax Media, owner of the SMH have a vested interest in the story.

Murdoch has gone on the record in recent days saying he wants to charge readers for online content on News Corporation web sites. The headline on Nick Tabakoff’s story squares nicely with Murdoch’s recent statements on the issue. We all know Murdoch interferes editorially in his papers. While it’s extremely unlikely he had a hand in this particularly story, it reflects the official line now coming from News Corporation.

Fairfax is more complicated. The company’s The Australian Financial Review operates behind a content pay wall. It costs around $3 a pop to view an AFR story, though most paying customers have all-you-can-eat subscriptions. On the other hand the SMH, The Age and the company’s other online properties including New Zealand’s stuff.co.nz are all free to readers and make money from online advertising.