One industry expert think the newspaper business will use an old idea. They will all soon try to charge for content. It’s not like this concept is fresh. It’s been tried before by newspapers online, without much success.

Lionel Barber, who is an editor for Financial Times thinks that a move towards paid content is inevitable for nearly every extant news organization.

“How these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air,” Barber said during a speech at at a Media Standards Trust. “But I confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content.”

There’s one big problem with such a scheme, and it should be obvious to just about anyone. Any time you start charging people for something that used to be free, you can expect a large number of formerly happy people to react angrily. Certainly charging for content will result in lower visitor numbers, which will reduce advertising revenue. Whether the amount they can take in from paid subscriptions is enough remains to be seen.

Barber went on to differentiate blogs from “real journalism.” He conceded that bloggers do occasionally break stories, but he said they don’t follow the same standards of reporting as true journalists do.

“[Bloggers] do not operate according to the same standards as those who aspire to and practise crafted journalism. They are often happy to report rumour as fact, arguing that readers or fellow networkers can step in to correct those “facts” if they turn out to be wrong. They are rarely engaged in the pursuit of original news: their bread and butter is opinion and comment,” he said.

Certainly he has a point. But the bigger question is: how much do these journalistic standards mean to the average news consumers? Judging by the numbers posted by local newspapers, not as much as they once did.

The big trouble would be that some newspapers would continue to offer free content in order to continue on with an advertiser model. Unless all newspapers online switch to a paid model, the ones that remain free would appear to have a major advantage.

Do I think that newspapers will start charging for “premium content?” Certainly. But the ones that attempt to put all their content behind a “paid gateway” stand to lose major eyeballs to the ones that don’t. Once they lose readers, they also lose advertisers. Unless managed with a deft hand, this type of move could very quickly end up being a costly blunder.