It is early days for newspaper pay walls. The experience so far says successful pay walls have four things in common.

Newspaper pay walls work for business newspapers like The National Business Review (NBR), The Australian Financial Review and The Financial Times.

Commentators often say pay walls and subscriptions work for niche titles providing specialist coverage and editorial quality.

This is true. For example, I work for CommsDay, which is a successful specialist niche title covering the telecommunications market. CommsDay doesn't use a pay wall – it is a daily PDF newsletter.

However, there's more to getting readers to pay for digitally delivered publications than occupying a specialist niche.

I've identified three other things needed for success:

• Quality. All the above titles are editorially excellent and professional. They are the best in their field.
• Appeal to well-heeled audience. People who buy online subscriptions are richer than average readers. Business people often have personal or company-wide budgets for buying media.
• Quick. Pay walls work when readers need information fast. They have to find it more convenient to whip out the credit card and pay for a subscription than walk to the local shop and buy a print copy of the publication or spend 30 minutes Googling for information.

Phillip Smith at Cliptec thinks online news is hard to read. He says:

It’s ok in small doses. But try a reading a whole paper online; it’s awful.

Smith has a point.

Online newspapers aren’t designed for easy reading. Publishers are more concerned with pushing advertising down reader’s throats.

It isn't just distracting animated ads. There are pop-out movie ads, bursts of sound and giant pop-ups which dance around in front of text.

They give a new meaning to “in your face”.

Publishers know passive online advertisements no longer work. Hardly anyone clicks on a banner these days and Google ads are not much better.

They need to make money. But there’s a danger they will kill the business by alienating readers.

If publishers told readers paid content means less advertising crap, they might be more willing to shell out for online news.

Applying my headline writing advice to some weaker, older headlines on my site, I realised others might find it useful to see how it works.

So here is my first headline improvement clinic. I've taken an old, weak headline and beefed it up:

Are reader donations a publishing business model?

At seven words and 50 characters this headline is short enough. It fits inside Google’s 64 character limit. Yet it could be tighter.

Like all version of ‘to be’, the verb ‘are’ is weak. It’s strengthened because it forms a question, but the headline needs backbone. ‘Can’ isn’t much better than ‘are’, but it’s a step forward. Adding the verb ‘save’ kicks things up a gear.

Articles, like ‘a’ rarely add anything to headlines – they act like padding. It’s best to lose them.

‘Publishing business model’ is jargon and off-putting for most readers. It has to go.

The story isn’t about general publishing, it’s about a print magazine. I could use ‘print magazine’ as the headline's object, but I prefer brevity, so I’ve opted for ‘print’.

Put these parts together gives me:

Can reader donations save print?

We’re down to a snappy five words and 32 characters. It’s more active than before thanks to the verb ‘save’. It’s also more direct and less off-putting.

Can you think of a better way to rewrite this headline?

Writing great online headlines should come naturally to old school journalists. But you don’t need to have worked on a newspaper to make headlines sing.

Just follow these guidelines:

• short – cram the maximum amount of meaning into the minimum number of words. There’s no strict guide to ideal word length, but search engines only care about the first 64 characters. Make every word count.
• clear – good writing is unambiguous, this is doubly important for headlines. They must be immediately understandable in any context.
• straightforward – use mainly nouns and verbs. Remember your nouns will be keywords for people using search engines.
• use simple words – short, Anglo Saxon words are best. Everyone knows exactly what they mean and they help you cram more meaning into fewer characters.
• active – use the active voice.
• avoid – forms of the verb to be. Articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’ are space wasters best left out of headlines. Use a comma rather than the word ‘and’. Try not to use pronouns.
• plain English – there’s a grab-bag of short clichéd headline words that people never use in real life – such as nix, slam, rap. It’s better to stick with everyday language.

Some experts will tell you lists, questions and commands work well in online headlines. All are worth trying, they’ll work better if you keep my five points in mind.

Finally, if you look at the older material my site, you’ll see I haven’t always stuck to my own guidelines. That’s because I’m still learning about online media. I’ve only developed this list in the last few weeks. In a future post I’ll show how I’ve improved some of these old headlines.

Print publishers paid freelance writers by the word. They needed to fill the space around lucrative ads and draw in readers with entertaining, informative copy. There was a market for bulk, readable copy.

Freelancer writers responded to market forces. They learned to write long. Some padded their prose with waffle. Most didn't feel pressure to write tight copy. A longer sentence bought a cup of coffee; a couple of extra paragraphs could fund a night in the pub.

Online publishing follows a different economic model. Web readers don't hang around. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen says: “If you want many readers, focus on short and scanable content.”

Online publishers want snappy copy over and over to maximise page reads and advertising clicks.

Which means freelance writers have to unlearn bad habits and get back to writing tight copy. For some of us older journalists this is like going back to our roots.

Those of us who learnt our trade in the 1970s grew up in a world where papers and magazines didn't have acres of space to fill. And well-staffed newsrooms meant every available column inch was fought over.

Us older freelance writers are relearning writing skills we first met a generation ago.

No-one doubts the quantity of information available online, but what about its quality?

In ancient times wars were fought over access to knowledge repositories.

Would our ancestors fight the same wars to access the net? Probably.

But that's mainly our ancestors liked a good scrap. While the Internet might be chock-a-block with information, it’s light on knowledge.

It is not the place to look for wisdom. Let’s face it, how many dead bodies would you walk over to unearth the lyrics of ‘Spice Up Your Life’?

Catalogues of high-resolution photographs showing supermodels in bathing costumes may be aesthetically pleasing. But unless you are a slow teenage boy wanting to study female anatomy, the knowledge content is slight.

Likewise those painstakingly collected lists of quotes by characters from The Simpsons: entertainment value high, enlightenment quotient low.

Then there are the millions of dumb home pages filled with photos of cuddly animals, basketball stars and soft porn princesses.

Adventurous, but unimaginative amateur developers garnish their pages with sound clips of heavy metal or rap. If you’re brave, you can find some of the most atrocious poetry ever written. Surf the net at random and you’ll find page after page of pure rubbish, mind-numbing sameness and precious little gold.

Of course, the web isn’t just the domain of gifted (or otherwise) non-professionals. These days commercial sites dominate. Most either sell something directly, or people who are selling things finance them. Which dilutes their value as independent information sources.

How much credence would you give to free on-line personal finance advice given to you by a bank?

In engineer-speak, the Internet could be said to have a low signal-to-noise ratio. That is, you have to sift through a great deal of rubbish to find anything worthwhile.

However, the expression implies a message is out there. Even if you know exactly what you are looking for and use the best search tools, you can still come badly unstuck.

Let me give you a chilling example.

A medical doctor surveyed 20 web sites offering help with self-treatment of common ailments. Each site looked plausible. Yet of the 20 sites, only three offered advice consistent with accepted medical procedure. A number offered seriously flawed advice. Some were no more than quackery.

We’re not talking about cultural differences; we are talking snake oil. Sooner or later, real people with real health problems are going to roll up at these sites, take the advice at face value and damage themselves.

This isn’t funny.

The worst aspect of this problem is when the sheer volume of trash drowns out good, well-researched information. Web-boosters used to say users would learn to recognise good information from bad by its brand. You might trust a news report from the ABC, BBC or CNN, but not from the National Enquirer. There’s some truth in the idea.

But do you know which brand to turn to for quality medical information or independent financial advice?

Regular readers may notice this web site has reverted to its minimalist look and feel. I've switched back for two reasons.

First, I wanted to cut down on the size of my pages – this format is quicker to download and displays better in a wider range of browsers – include those on mobile phones. It's also easy to read.

Second, I plan to customise the site's look and feel in coming weeks. This is an easier basis to work from.

WordPress aficionados will recognise the theme here is The Journalist by Lucian E Marin.

Here are some of the stories I've had published over the years during my time as a writer, journalist, editor and publisher. I'll be updating and expanding this list as time and resources permit.

Will smart phones bury PDAs?
Making eCRM work for your business
This content is classified
Computers – an encyclopedia entry
File-sharing networks
Preparing the ground for highfaluting applications
Australian Net Guide
CRM: Big bang theory explodes
Web hosting: Asian market ripe for harvesting
Who are the MBAs?
Games technology degree passport to a great career
Book Review: The Constant Gardener by John le Carre

Experiment

Download a PDF of a story on outdoor gadgets I wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald's Sydney Magazine. There's also a PDF version of a story I wrote for the paper's Next section 'Knocking on the right opportunities' about CRM.

I'd be grateful for any feedback from readers using these downloads.