Cynthia McCune's personal annotations on this page
Cynmccune bookmarked
on 2009-05-22
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Charging on the Web won't work for general-news publishers, and there are better alternatives.
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the current thinking of a growing number of newspaper executives. To paraphrase: "We believe that our local reporting has high value, it costs us a lot to produce it, so we will retrain the audience that they must pay for it."
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Newspapers' local content is not as important as it once was, or as newspaper executives still believe it to be. The demise of some newspapers (Rocky Mountain News, Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example) and the degraded quality of many others due to severe cuts and layoffs has opened up opportunities for a wave of fledgling replacement news providers, both for- and non-profit. Generally they are small and/or target niches, but they're getting better and some are growing to represent a looming threat to local newspapers by offering up similar or the same coverage for free.
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The move to hide locally produced content behind a pay wall gives new hope to other competitors, including local TV stations. If the biggest newspaper in town is going to shoot itself in the foot, it gives a savvy TV outlet's executives the chance to grab the dominant spot by creating a free news and community Web site that goes well beyond today's typical local-TV sites. It could even use the laid-off newspaper journalists in its market -- a talent pool looking for something else to do -- to accomplish this, probably at bargain rates.
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Yet another model is to sell a custom news phone app rather than give it away.
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ideas for what to offer to a newspaper's paid members:
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learn to sell something else to support the journalism.
This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 May 2009, by Cynthia McCune.
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Another big player making noises about charging for news content is the New York Times Co. Executive editor Bill Keller said last week that NYTimes.com is considering two principal options to pry money out of online readers' pockets in order to supplement ad revenues:
1. A "metering" system that would track how much a visitor to NYTimes.com is viewing online, then when a threshold is reached (a set number of page-views or words read) the site would ask for payment, probably in the form of a monthly subscription. -
2. A "membership" program that would keep NYTimes.com content free as it is now, but offer as yet unspecified other benefits for paying members.
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* Once-a-month lecture with free admission for members. (Others pay, so with a good speaker line-up it's another revenue source.)
* Seminar series featuring staff journalists and community leaders and celebrities; free to members.
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Charging on the Web won't work for general-news publishers, and there are better alternatives.
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the current thinking of a growing number of newspaper executives. To paraphrase: "We believe that our local reporting has high value, it costs us a lot to produce it, so we will retrain the audience that they must pay for it."
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