Newsday to fight the trend; charge for news online
Geez, can today get any crazier?
Apparently it can.
Yinka Adegoke of Reuters reports today:
Cablevision Systems Corp. plans to charge online readers of its Newsday newspaper, a move that would make it one of the first large U.S. papers to reverse a trend toward free Web readership.
… Cablevision Chief Operating officer Tom Rutledge said the cable TV company was aware of the difficulties faced by the traditional newspaper business.
“Our goal was and is to use our electronic network assets and subscriber relationships to transform the way news is distributed,” he said on a conference call with analysts.
“We plan to end the distribution of free Web content,” he added.
The whole pay-for-news thing has been debated widely over the past couple of weeks, thanks to the infamous Walter Isaascson Time magazine piece. Read that article — for free! — here.
Alan Mutter has also been thinking deeply about micropayments. Won’t pay enough, he says. He recently posted a two-part takeout on the subject. Find that here and here.
On the other hand, Paul Gillin at the Newspaper Death Watch blog thinks they’ll work. Find his piece here.
The New York Observer published a big piece this week on how to save newspapers. Since they’re such big experts on it, y’know. Their point: Forget print and concentrate on mobile platforms. Find that piece here.
Find a really good roundup of the entire debate at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
February 27th, 2009 at 2:18 am
I’ve also been blogging about how to pay for news online. My questions are “what does it look like, how does it work and why?”
Check it out: http://www.fixjournalism.com
Newsday is moving what I think is the right direction but doing it the wrong way.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Five reasons this is a bad idea:
1) News has a diminishing value. Every second a story exists it loses value.
2) Every second a story exists, another person has the potential to cull the same sources and get the same information and publish a similar story for free. This obviously isn’t true for long-term investigative projects, but these are far and few between and with fair use can be summarized and republished pretty easily. Yes, you’re local. Yes, you might know information first. But, between paying to get it first and getting it for free five minutes later on twitter, I’ll take twitter.
3) The amount of money you get from subscriptions in no way compares to the amount of money you lose from advertising rates by reducing your audience. What? Yes. You will have a smaller audience with a paid product. This lowers your advertising revenue, I would say, drastically.
4) You limit the potential of people stumbling upon an article and learning about your news product. This hurts your ability to effectively grow your audience.
5) It’s a recession.
The notion that people ever paid for news is a misnomer. The subscription costs paid for materials and distribution, if that. The goal was to increase circulation to increase advertising rates. But to think advertising was the sole benefactor of newspapers would be wrong as well. Products unrelated to news, such as classifieds, helped pay the bills.
Rather than fighting against its audience and advertisers, Newsday should be innovating new high profit, low cost products akin to classifieds to fuel news coverage. This is true of many TV stations, who pay for the news with all those reality shows we love so much.