ABC News Digital execs are currently putting together a formal paywall strategy with expectations of having some concrete ideas for ways to charge consumers by the summer, said Paul Slavin, the unit’s SVP, in an interview with paidContent. This isn’t the first time ABC News has traveled the paid content route. Back in 2003, it created a premium program tied to the 2004 presidential election. Also at that time, ABCNews, along with CNN, put video behind a subscription wall, both as a standalone and as part of short-lived services RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) SuperPass and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Platinum. But a lack of traction among viewers forestalled those efforts and they were quickly abandoned. In the interim, rising online ad dollars in the second half of the decade made talk of paywalls and subscriptions at the network seem more academic than anything else.

But that changed with the collapse in online ad growth. CNN has had some initial success with its paid iPhone app, which costs $2 per download and also features ads. At the same time, ABC (NYSE: DIS) News is going through a massive reorg right now,  with buyouts offered to all non-union employees not under personal services contracts. By various estimates, ABC needs between 300 and 400 employees to take buyouts in order to avoid layoffs. The cuts will accelerate the network’s emphasis on digital newsgathering.

Slavin offered general outlines of his team’s approach to paywalls and premium, but no specifics yet. An ABC staffer since graduating college in 1980, Slavin has headed ABC News Digital for nearly three years.

While he insisted that advertising revenues are getting stronger and have met the division’s expectations, the realities affecting all online media outlets are the same, he said. “Things are changing and we need to seriously think about alternatives to ad support,” Slavin said. “And that will involve creating some mix of free and paid content for our digital content.”

paidContent: What kind of debates have you been having about paywalls at ABC News?

Paul Slavin: We’re spending a lot of time discussing pay vs. free. How much do we put behind the wall and how much do we keep free? We’re talking about that in terms of different platforms. The iPad has been a great conversation starter. But it’s not an either/or. There’s no reason that pay and free can’t live together and support each other. No one is talking about putting content behind a paywall and no one is talking about making everything free.

Isn’t the idea of paywalls particularly foreign to broadcast companies—despite the recent battles between the network and Cablevision (NYSE: CVC)—compared to newspapers and magazines, which have an inherent disposition towards charging consumers?

True, there’s a psychology, particularly in a broadcast organization, where we’re so used to distributing content to consumers for free – well, solely ad-supported, to be exact – it’s hard for some people to put their heads around it. Some stuff can be windowed; some stuff can be gated. There’s a lot of different alternatives. We’ve been having a vigorous internal conversation around that for the last couple of weeks.

Do you consider the tradition of relying solely on ad support an obstacle? Is it harder to change the institutional thinking at a broadcast property with regard to online paywells?

I don’t think it’s harder for us, though we’re probably starting further back than others who have had an experience with subscriptions and newsstand sales. When you already have the various pay-points, this sort of thing does come more naturally.

You have blogs like The Note, which covers politics. Are those the kinds of resources that you specifically believe can be supported by a paywall?

Possibly. We look at those things that we know have a strong and determined audience. Whether it’s certain types of politics or investigative news or certain kinds of things we can add value to. The conversation is not just around the content. It’s about finding some sort of functionality or added value product or package that we can ask people to sign up. It’s not too dissimilar when you used to get a gift when you called up to subscribe to Time magazine.

What’s the time frame for finding the paywall?

I’d like to have the basic answer about the paywall strategy by June. This is an idea that we need to start seriously experimenting with.  I don’t think we’ll have the final answer, but we can at least have a few ideas that we can put out to market and see what the take is.

How will the reduction of some 300 or 400 jobs at ABC News—which has about 1,500 staffers—affect online?

The news division is not being gutted, but it is a terrible thing for the staffers involved. But I think it’s being handled compassionately and with an eye toward not damaging the news product. We hope, at the end of this – and this is what I believe – that the user will never notice it. For us, it does mean that this organization will go through a lot of retraining and a lot of new technology. Oddly enough, we’ll come out stronger, more flexible and more educated as a result.

As for digital, everybody will become a multitasker. Many more people will be shooting, recording, editing using digital technology. And there is an emphasis on the part of the whole company that digital is a growth area. Along with the new types of work, there will be new types of revenue and new business models.

Yesterday, CNN’s Jon Klein said that he didn’t think the 6:30 national broadcast news was that essential anymore. Your thoughts?

That’s an opinion that’s not necessarily shared by the 8 million people who watch Diane Sawyer every night at 6:30, or the 24 million other people who tune in to watch the evening news. You can take the aggregated audience of all the cable stations and it still doesn’t add up to one evening news broadcast gets. Look, the model certainly has challenges. It’s a new world, but broadcast news is still vital and it still sets the pace.

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