Why Steve Jobs and micropayments won't save the media.

In recent weeks, as the newspaper industry's fortunes have gone from abysmal to apocalyptic, a parade of boldfaced writers and thinkers have put forth a series of sweeping proposals to save the daily newspaper. Normally, reporters are a cynical bunch. We suspect sources to pursue ulterior motives and reflexively question grandiose schemes. Entrepreneurs, financiers, and politicians might sniff at this ingrained opposition to change, but if a new idea seems too good to be true, chances are it is. So when journalists chuck their skepticism and start talking like starry-eyed Silicon Valley venture capitalists, you know the newspaper industry is in dire shape.

Last week, Time magazine entered the save-the-newspaper fray with a cover story by Walter Isaacson that championed the cause of "micropayments"—tiny fees charged for individual articles or monthly subscriptions sold for a nominal rate. The central analogy of the micropayments argument is that Steve Jobs was able to convince consumers to start paying 99 cents for iTunes music downloads. "The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment," Isaacson writes. "Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an entire industry."

Isaacson isn't alone in wishing that Jobs could do for journalism what his iTunes and the iPod have done for music. New York Times media columnist David Carr has written glowingly about an iTunes-like model on several occasions. On Jan. 12, Slate's Jack Shafer followed Carr's lead and dreamed up what an iPod-like newspaper device should actually look like. (His point was that slim Netbook laptops already fulfill the role nicely.)

As comforting as it might be to wish that Jobs could revive foundering newspapers the same way he created a revenue model for the music industry, it's not going to happen. "I'm skeptical about the magical device in the near term that is going to save [newspapers]," says Walt Mossberg, the eminent technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal (which, coincidentally, charges for his articles). "I'm skeptical of payment by the article," he adds.

There is a multitude of reasons why Jobs won't save newspapers (and it's not just because the secretive CEO hates the media). Put simply, journalism is not music. Yes, Jobs convinced consumers to pay for music in digital form. But unlike an individual newspaper link, an iTunes purchase becomes digital property a music lover can enjoy for life. (I must have listened to the latest Animal Collective tracks a dozen times last week before I got sick of them.) Compare that to a dispatch from Baghdad or an analysis of the stimulus bailout. No matter how illuminating and engaging, journalism is fleeting by comparison. What's the value differential between owning music for life and scanning one article? Hard to say. But it's probably a lot less than the 10 cents Isaacson proposes.

There's an even bigger flaw in the iPod/iTunes analogy. While Jobs did succeed in getting people to pay for digital music, for the 1.4-billion-plus songs legally downloaded last year, more than 40 billion were stolen on peer-to-peer networks. That means that while some consumers are willing to pay for digital music, about 95 percent of us want it for free.