Brill's letters of intent commit newspapers only to sharing information and talking with his company, which wants to sell them micropayment technology. In terms of technology, this is a long-solved problem, but Brill is trying to conjure something more: A consensus that everyone take the jump at the same time. No publisher wants to be charging while his print competitors are still giving away his "premium" content for free. Brill's mission, then, is to make paywalls seem imminent and inevitable, one press campaign at a time. He should hope publishers don't ask too many questions about his plan.

Brill's latest venture is a completely unnecessary company offering internet micropayment software, which already exists, to newspapers, which emphatically should not be buying it. It's one of the stupidest ideas we've ever encountered. But! Brill says he has letters of intent from 506 newspapers, right in his pocket. "This is a pretty good milestone," one of his partners told PaidContent.

Yet when PaidContent asked for names of a few of these customers, Brill's Journalism Online Inc. clammed up, "after weeks of promising a list." So observers must decide for themselves whether to trust a businessman who...

...Didn't live up to his word on what he was selling. Customers paid $200 for a year-long Clear membership but were left in the cold when the company closed down, even if they'd had only a month of service delivered. "Senior creditors," meanwhile, got dibs on the company's remaining assets.

...Didn't live up to his word on customer privacy. Brill told customers of his last failed venture, the "Clear" airport fast-pass program, that their personal information would be locked behind "two levels of password protection." Then a laptop with personal information on 33,000 Clear customers mysteriously disappeared, and it turned out the data was unencrypted..

Do newspapers really want this man asking consumers to whip out their credit cards? We'll see!

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times did some digging and found several large publishers have NOT signed on with Brill, including:

• Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal)
• McClatchy Co. (30 daily newspapers)
• Tribune Co. (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, etc.)

Gannett Co., with 84 daily papers, declined to comment to the Times.

It's not that Clear is bankrupt; according to a FAQ on the company website, it's not seeking legal protection from creditors. It's just that right now "Verified Identity Pass, Inc. cannot issue refunds due to the company's financial condition."

Translation: If you think you're legally owed a refund, we're going to make you sue, as we have a "senior creditor" to worry about.

Of course, Clear customers were already used to poor treatment from the company; as software entrepreneur Joel Spolsky points out, Clear required customers undergo detailed background checks, even though this was a pointless waste of time, since the customers ended up having to go through the same security inspection as everyone else (after they cut to the front of the line, the reward for paying $200/year).

Right about now the customers are wishing they had run some background checks of their own. Brill, who left the company in February, says customer data submitted to the company is safe. Probably.

Brill's latest company, "Clear," which was supposed to save rich people a half hour standing in security lines at airports in exchange for $128 a year, is shutting down. Let's do a quick and dirty balance sheet of Brill's successes and failures—keeping in mind that to do your best is all your mom really asks.

Successes

The American Lawyer: Brill launched what would become the nation's leading legal magazine in 1979. This is not an unqualified success, though, since American Lawyer Media (now Incisive Media) is having problems right now.

Court TV: Brill created the network (now truTV) in 1991. After receiving a huge popularity boost from the OJ Simpson trial, it was sold it to Time Warner in 1997. For which Brill got a tidy sum.

Emily Brill: Steven's daughter, the ultimate narrator.

Failures

Brill's Content: Launched in 1998, this mediacentric mag was supposed to capitalize on America's insatiable thirst for news about the news! Turned out not that many people really care about the news about the news. Not enough to pay money, at least. Stopped publishing in 2001.

Contentville.com: A website selling "a variety of content ranging from thesis papers to ebooks." Closed in 2001.

Inside.com: The legendary media site that launched the careers of many top media reporters and also failed to make any money. The magazine version of Inside was merged with Brill's Content, and the website was part of a convoluted plan with Primedia to corner the market on media trade publications, but the whole thing was shuttered in 2001.

Clear: In the post-9/11 world, Brill noticed, airport security sure was a hassle. People would pay to be "verified" beforehand so they could breeze right through! Right? 165,000 people did, reportedly, and Clear raised more than $100 million from investors, but now it's dead, unable to afford to keep going.

Brill also wrote a couple books which didn't sell all that well and a column for Newsweek, but you can judge those on their own merits. He's not out of the game, though—his other ongoing venture is Journalism Online, a company that plans to help various magazines and newspapers charge readers for online access. Bet on it!
[Pic via]

Brill, among the media industry's more colorful entrepreneurs, has been laying the groundwork for today's announcement for some time. Last month he stepped down from his job running the fast-pass company; in February he floated a not-so-"confidential" memo urging the New York Times to resume charging for internet content.

Now he's launched Journalism Online Inc., whose goal is to make it easy for technologically-challenged newspaper companies to sell online subscriptions and individual stories. The company, which Brill co-founded with former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz and former telecom executive Leo Hindery Jr.,hopes to sell simple software to implement content payment schemes, while allowing consumers to create a single account, usable across all Journalism Online-affiliated publications.

Brill told the Times:

"Much of the barrier to charging online is the transaction friction, as opposed to the actual cost. With this system, you'd have a single password, give your credit number just once."

Trouble is, 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, as we've noted before. Amazon's sophisticated system can be easily customized, but can also be implemented as simply as including an HTML snippet on a Web page.

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.

Given that newspapers publishers' single biggest Web idea this year has been to recycle the very old "let's charge for content" meme, he's probably on to something.

Yes, that Steven Brill — the one who founded CourtTV, Brill's Content and dotbomb casualty Contentville. VIP largely arose from Brill's contention that a private company institute a national ID program in his Newsweek column, where according to Slate:

Brill had the keen insight that it would take an outsider to make the security pass happen. He had no faith that the government could pull off something like it.

Now the Trasportation Security Administration has grounded Clear from signing up new customers until more robust data encryption is put into place. (Photo by Getty/David Paul Morris)