U.S. News Weekly: Now how much would you pay?

This week, the publishers of U.S. News and World Report announced it's launching a publishing experiment that's been tried before: a weekly edition of its now-biweekly print news service in PDF format, for subscribers willing to pay about $20 per year.

Already, the concept has been given a lot of guff elsewhere on the Web. The prevailing word thus far appears to be that no one wants to pay for news any more, and why should they? Information, after all, "wants to be free."

In my experience, information has never in the history of humankind been free -- someone has always paid the price, the question has always been, who. In the case of print news publishers, the dilemma facing them now is how to remain viable when the Internet is capable of providing not only more immediacy but better context. An issue of Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News seems like a Year In Review issue every time it hits the stands. And the product that's putting them in the dark ages, is typically free to the consumer.

But it's not free. So Mort Zuckerman's company is testing the waters with asking consumers how much of a premium is fair, for a well-produced, premium product? Let's face it, a lot of what portends to be Internet news is junk -- it may be fast, but it's not literary, it's not always factual, and too much of it isn't even good journalism. If U.S. News could guarantee the literary quality of a regularly delivered product -- good analysis, well-rendered opinion, honest reporting -- would you be willing to pay twenty bucks a year for it?

Zuckerman may be following in Steve Jobs' shoes a little bit in one critical respect: finding the right price point for turning around an audience. Jobs found it: 99¢ per song. Could Zuckerman's $20 per year be the price readers are willing to pay for quality...assuming it's quality? I'd be very, very interested in finding out.