News site counts on readers to pay for experience

NEW YORK (AP) - A new website called Ongo wants to charge people $7 per month to look at news that is for the most part free elsewhere.

Yet the people behind it _ former eBay Inc. executives _ believe there’s a large audience of heavy news consumers who will pay for a site that pulls together quality stories in one place and lays them out in a clean, ad-free format.

“Are they willing to pay for content? Doubtful,” Ongo Inc. CEO Alex Kazim says. “But they would pay for a better experience. Someone is willing to pay $2 for a cup of coffee at Starbucks when they could go to McDonald's and get it for $1.”

The site, which launched Tuesday, has financial backing from some of the country’s biggest publishers. The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co. and USA Today publisher Gannett Co. have invested $4 million each.

Online advertising has not generated enough revenue for newspapers to offset declines in print, so charging on the Web has surfaced as a potential solution. But that’s difficult when readers have scores of free options elsewhere.

So if a free aggregator of news and opinion, such as the Huffington Post or Google News, is McDonald's coffee, what makes Ongo believe it’s got a better brew?

For starters, Ongo is going for a smoother reading experience.

Subscribers won’t have to jump from site to site for a broad take on the news. While free sites will often run a headline that links readers to, say, a New York Times story at NYTimes.com, Ongo is hosting stories from the Times and other publishers on its own site. Stories at Ongo are laid out in multiple columns like a newspaper, so readers won’t be forced to scroll down the Web page as is typical elsewhere.

Ongo is one of many efforts in the news industry to charge for online news. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, charges $3.99 per week for news delivered on Apple Inc.’s iPad. The Journal’s parent company, News Corp., has hired journalists for an upcoming iPad newspaper, The Daily, though it has yet to provide details on any fees.

It’s too early to tell whether Ongo or any of these other approaches will work. The company, which is based in Cupertino, Calif., not far from Apple’s headquarters, wouldn’t share specific financial projections.

For now, Ongo is available only as a website, but an iPad app is on the way.

A computer handles the bulk of Ongo’s story selection, as is the case with Google News and many other aggregators. But in Ongo’s case, five editors tweak the picks and look for hidden gems.

There’s a place for saving stories to read later and tools for sharing them on Facebook and Twitter.

And there are no ads of any kind _ no paid search links, no banners, no video spots.

The whole experience is paid for by readers. For $6.99 per month, subscribers can get a basic selection of stories from the Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Associated Press and the Financial Times. With The New York Times and the Financial Times, readers get a limited selection of items chosen by the outlet’s editors.

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