Jack Shafer believes there’s good precedent for charging users for online content. But it has to be content people really, really want, and it should be packaged in some form other than what we now know of as Web pages.

The “general news” sections of newspapers, and their affiliated Web sites, typically provide the opposite of what an online user could be persuaded to pay for. Based on theories of storytelling that go back to the days of street-corner newsboys, papers slice and dice the local events of the day into simple narratives that can support flashy headlines and cute or shocking images.

Consumers, we’ve learned, will pay for content that will guide them toward deciding where to invest and/or gamble (cf. the paid-access portions of wsj.com and espn.com). Business people will pay for information that’s relevant to their particular industries (cf. the Puget Sound Business Journal).

How can these lessons be applied to coverage of local government, politics, civic planning, social trends, and spot news?

That will be a topic for a later post.