The Brill Solution For Paid Content -- Not

Okay, we all realize that we have an industry — print media — that’s in serious trouble here. And it’s easy to see why some execs are starting to panic. But a word to the wise: Beware of that first wave of cavalry now visible on the horizon.

Three veterans of old media, led by Steven Brill, who’s a serial entrepreneur (Court TV, The American Lawyer, as well as the founder of several noisy-but-weak-signal ventures like Brill’s Content and my all-time favorite dumb Web 1.0 concept, Contentville) are riding into town.

Their play is called Journalism Online. Geesh, that sounds so boring in the context of Web 2.0 (Flickr, Twitter, Yelp) that my bet is they rushed to print with the project’s placeholder name because they didn’t want to wait for the branding folks to do their thing.

Therefore, I’m hereby going to rename it JO!, as long as nobody objects. JO! promises to launch an e-commerce platform this fall that news sites can use to charge daily, monthly or annual subscriptions or even micro-payments (for individual articles).

(Check out my Bnet colleague Cathy Taylor’s brilliant put-down of the micro-payment idea.)

Brill and his partners are said to be in “some stage” of discussion with top newspaper and magazine companies, but they have not signed any deals yet. According to the company’s release, JO! “will develop a password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.”

Well, this is either one of the lamest attempts I’ve seen yet of business sharks trying to trick old media execs to reinvent the wheel or the word JO! doesn’t mean a 1.276 meter wooden staff used in japanese martial arts (thus jodo!)

As Ryan Tate over at Valleywag pointed out last night: “people with much more tech and retail cred than Brill already offer ways to do the same thing. PayPal and Amazon both offer micropayments interfaces to programmers…Brill has no prayer of competing with either Amazon or PayPal when it comes to scalability, fraud protection, or number of existing accounts. Like countless consultants and software companies before him, Brill’s only hope is to convince old-school newspaper publishers they’re better off buying overpriced content management “solutions” than building simple, reliable websites using off-the-shelf technology and in-house programming.”

Well-put.

Oh, and one more thing. To any publishing exec engaged in discussions with these guys: You might to check out that 4-foot wooden staff Brill is holding behind his back before he commits his next act of highway robbery — against you.