Tune in, log on, and pay up
The best things in life -- TV, radio, newspapers -- used to be free, or pretty darned close to free. And now they're not. So the media question for 2006 is: What are you going to pay for, and why?
When I grew up, before the dawn of time, a good newspaper cost a nickel or a dime and what came over the airwaves to your television or radio cost nothing. Now the infotainment giants want to hook their vacuum cleaner up to your wallet and suck you dry. What are you going to do about it?
The dilemmas, in order:
1. Television TV has succeeded in convincing 85 percent of the American public to pay for shows that we used watch for free. My cable bill is about $48 a month, with no premium channels, and I don't recall costs ever going down, hahaha.
Now the broadcast barons want to sell us various time-shifting services, like
So will you shell out cash to further enrich families like the Comcast-owning Robertses of Philadelphia, or will you spend money on. . .
2. RadioWith great fanfare, two new satellite radio services, XM and Sirius, claim to have signed a total of 8 million subscribers. Would you really pay $13 a month to hear Howard Stern, or Radio Margaritaville, or soporific NPR outcast Bob Edwards? I wouldn't.
Will pay radio ever reach a TV-like tipping point, where you feel you have to pay to get a decent signal, or, say, decent classical music? Possibly, but I doubt it. Four of the six great pillars of radio -- news, talk, traffic, and weather -- seem pretty secure to me. XM and Sirius seem to be carving up major league sports, so true junkies will have to subscribe to both. AM-FM music is a mess, and the satellite networks have adroitly created micro-channels for almost every abstruse taste.
Of course, you can always carry your music with you, in an iPod or CD, leaving you money for. . .
3. Newspapers I occasionally meet businesspeople who marvel at the newspaper industry. ''Sure, I like my product," a businessman would say. ''But that doesn't mean I give it away for free." And yet, for about the past 10 years, that is exactly what most newspapers have been doing, by allowing free access on the Internet.
Finally, the situation is changing, as a newspaper like The New York Times is asking its online readers to pay to read certain features. (The Wall Street Journal has never offered its online edition for free.) It's far from clear whether this program, called TimesSelect, will succeed. The Los Angeles Times and Slate magazine have tried charging for online content, and both backed off.
Placing digital newspaper content ''behind the wall," as the digitheads say, has several effects: It makes some money, but it also decreases online readership, and lowers the audience for advertisements that run on newspaper websites. I haven't read Salon magazine ever since they asked me to pay. It's just not worth it. I haven't read any of the New York Times columnists, whose work appears in TimesSelect, in months. I would pay50 cents to read a Joe Nocera column, but the Times isn't offering me that option -- yet.
For the moment, the Internet offers some interesting market anomalies.I would pay to read a lot of the content in Slate magazine, but they don't ask me to. I enjoy reading my friend David Warsh's column at economicprincipals.com,but, churlishly, I won't pay the $50 he charges for an e-mail subscription. I lovewatching the absolutely-not-ready-for-prime-time ''diavlogs" on the website bloggingheads.tv -- think James Cramer on huge doses of lithium -- but I can't imagine paying to see them.
Some of the good things in life are still free -- but I doubt they will be for long.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
