Posted on 03/12/2010 12:54:56 PM PST by NormsRevenge
NEW YORK (AFP) – With The New York Times and Rupert Murdoch poised to start charging for newspapers online, media heavyweights sparred on Thursday over whether readers will pay for news on the Web.
The Times plans to require payment for full access to NYTimes.com in early 2011 and Murdoch, who already charges for The Wall Street Journal online, has pledged to begin charging Web readers of his other News Corp. newspapers.
Keynote speakers and panelists at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit here differed sharply on whether Internet users would be ready to shell out money for what they have become accustomed to getting for free.
New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger said the time is right for his newspaper to start charging for its website and the move will provide a "critical" new revenue stream to add to print and online advertising revenue.
"There is an opportunity, I think, for us to gain a great deal of revenue from this paid model going forward," Times Co. president and chief executive Janet Robinson said.
Merrill Brown, chief strategist for Journalism Online, said more than 1,300 publications around the world have expressed interest in the services offered by the company founded last year to help news outlets make money on the Web.
"Everyone of them is contemplating a paid strategy of one kind or another," Brown said.
Readers will not pay for "commoditized headlines," he said, "but they will pay for very specialized news.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
They tried this once. It won’t go well. Their clickthrough revenue will drop and it won’t increase print sales.
I’d say they are nuts — and the Journalism Online guys are scam artists. There is plenty of money to be made by online newspapers, but not through selling general news.
News is like sex. For every one that charges, there are many that give it away..............
Time to short New York Times stock..yet again.
Hey, Pinch, you need to get off the drugs. No conservative in his right mind will ever pay to read the New York Times, and liberals don't pay for anything out of their own pockets if they can help it. And don't count on the black community either. Very few blacks read the New York Times, even now when it's free, let alone read it when they gotta pay for it.
I pay for things of value to me... for example, we have a decent local paper that covers home town sports and the local school activities quite well... I pay for that online because it reports the news in my area and they don’t give it away for free.
There’s no value to me in paying to read someone’s opinion about the news, especially someone’s opinion out on the East Coast. I already pay for TV and it’s chock full of the NYT and Wall Street Journal’s opinions. I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine what the NYT would write about any given thing, anyway, so why pay to confirm the NYT still hates everything the Red States hold dear.
If the media switches to PayGo, they will try to shut down FR’s “excerpting” of articles for discussion.
But they will never try to silence Rush Limbaugh or G.Gordon Liddy both of whom read articles (or excerpts) on the air.
Liddy used to devote a whole hour of his program to reading articles and editorials from the paper while interjecting his own commentary/rebuttal/etc into the piece he is reading. Later as syndication deals changed and most markets didn’t carry the whole program he took to reading a few articles in each hour.
It’ll be like cable television, you PAY to see it but you still have to suffer through advertising that should be enough to subsidize it.
I think online news sites have a great service they offer to their print subscribers. Many will give you searchable access to their database of full-text articles from many years past (1985 in some markets).
However, you shouldn’t have to buy the paper to access it. Just go to your local public library where they already have a subscription to the paper (paid by taxdollars) and ask them to log you into the newspaper’s archives. There should be no reason the library CAN’T do this for patrons.
I agree with the sports and local news to a certain extent..unfortunately, even they insert their own liberal agenda into these sacred departments.
Robert Lusetich on Fox News yesterday came up with a “readable” article about Tiger Woods until he went pro-Obama/anti Bush in his description of Ari Fleicher who served under Bush. My former local hockey blogger went further left in his analogy of goalies comparable to Obama (yup).
I pay for their crossword puzzles. Yes, there are free puzzles elsewhere, but theirs are the best.
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