Merrill Brown: New paid system will launch soon

Merrill Brown said his company is ready and willing to tackle pay walls soon. The founder of MMB Media has been working to develop a system that will allow media companies to charge for content.

"We all have to take this plunge," he said. And that his company is offering a change "to engage in a product development process that helps you think of your most important customers and how to engage them best."

He said his "Journalism Online" venture will unveil a set of testing sites that will test our economic assumptions, and that it will probably happen within the next four weeks.

Brown said if news companies do not begin to look at alternative ways and stop sticking "their heads in the sand" the situation will only get worse.

By Andy Medici