In the media industry, the name Steven Brill tends to bring back a lot of memories. The founder of CourtTV and Brill’s Content, he went on to create a new media entity called Inside, which was staffed with writers from Fortune and other leading publications. But the venture eventually folded. As more and more content moved online, Brill later tried to create a venture known as Contentville, which he envisioned as a sort of one-stop shop for content of all kinds — text, photos, video, audio — which publishers and distributors could offer through his online store.
Sound familiar? It should, because Brill is trying to revive the idea through a new project called Journalism Online, which he and his new partners announced this week. But the new venture has an unusual twist that Contentville — which eventually shut down due to a lack of revenue — did not.
Whatever you think of his idea, it’s clear that Brill still has some pretty high-powered contacts in media: one of his partners is Gordon Crovitz, the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and one of the guys who decided to charge money for the WSJ online, something virtually every other newspaper publisher dreams of doing someday. The third partner is Leo Hindery, a former telecom industry executive. Also on the board of advisors are former senior U.S. attorney David Boies and former Solicitor General Ted Olsen. The news release says that Journalism Online LLC will:
“…quickly facilitate the ability of newspaper, magazine and online publishers to realize revenue from the digital distribution of the original journalism they produce.”
How will it do this? Brill promises a four-point Marshall Plan for news, including a password-protected site where publishers can put their content and users can buy “annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.” But it’s the third point in this plan that raises some interesting questions: the release says that the venture will “negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.”
(read the rest of this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab)