Posted on 03/14/2005 6:04:15 AM PST by Drango
Bummer
Hey pulp media - go ahead and charge - you'll only die faster. What idiots! They're already in a bind because they lie more thickly than shearling carpet and yet they arrogantly think people will pay for their tripe online. Sorry, you clowns, the circus has moved on.
Liberal papers writing in yesterday's technology wonder how they will make money to exist tomorrow selling their propaganda - to be honest - I read some of them on-line just to see what that left is crying about or to use their own words against them - but there is no way I will give them any money if they charge for it...
I will not read it if I have to support it with my money.
Ever.
"Today, if you make a wrong decision, there's a chance it will be not only embarrassing, but very costly."
I remember a guy giving a speech on safety in High School. His opening line was "Have any of you had a fatal accident?"
Main Stream Press should have been in the audience.
Decades ago, I read the NYT seven days a week for four straight years, in order to know what was going on in the world.
I now read items from the NYT website only when pointed to them by trusted bloggers or trusted websites - and normally it's to shake my head in disgust (or laughter) at the tripe they try to pass off as unbiased reporting.
Newspapers traditionally have supported themselves based on advertising, just as traditional radio and television have. The Reader, for example, has been a free newspaper in Chicago for decades. At the turn of the 20th Century many newspapers dramatically reduced their cost to a penny or two, because they wanted to get their circulation up without regard to revenue received from sales.
The Audit Bureau of Circulation only measures paid circulation because of the belief that those readers who pay for the publication are going to look through it and see the advertisements. Today, clickthroughs measure those who actually click on an advertisement, so a more precise measurement is possible.
If news can be published -- as it is on the internet -- without paying for ink, newsprint, deliverymen, etc., and advertisers are prepared to pay to have their advertisements published alongside the stories, with measurable readership, then everybody wins. If the advertising market develops properly, there will be no need to charge for electronic distribution.
I still pay for two newspapers -- The Oklahoman (conservative) and Norman Transcript (getting less liberal but good sports) -- but I will NEVER pay to read a paper on line especially the NY Times.
There are plenty of free news sources on line.
But even if there weren't, we've the options of
listening to the pertinent news on cable and
the area news on local stations, TV/radio. WHY
do they think the majority of newshounds are
so interested in reading the paper's spin on an
issue? I already subscribe to one admitted spin
doctor; he's proven himself to be more right than
wrong on endless numbers of issues. That's
sufficient for me. The NYT, et al. can keep their
printed editions.
I subscribe to the WSJ because I get value every day. I wouldn't spend a dime on the NYT's
The internet has ads? Hmmm, I guess so - with Firefox + Adblock, it's pretty easy to forget sometimes ;)
Well, we get the Sunday paper because they pay us. How? The coupons in the paper outweigh the cost of the paper. So, the real choice is "free on line" or "paid of line". However I do willingly pay for a weekly edition of Washington Times.
Was it a public school? If so, how many students raised their hands? :-p
It must really suck to have technology break your monopoly and turn you into a candidate for chapter 11.
~snicker
The difficulty that newspapers face for charging for on-line versions is that their marginal cost per incremental on-line subscriber approaches zero.
Nearly all the costs are incurred upfront, before anyone actually reads the paper on-line. The cost of "printing" one more copy is nearly zero, the cost of "delivering to the door" one more copy is nearly zero.
This means that the attempt to charge for content will always be subject to the most severe price competition. For general circulation papers, only folks who develop an economic model that doesn't rely on subscriptions will win.
Furthermore, because the on-line versions are eating into the paid hard copy subscription base, eventually, only general circulation newspapers that develop a free hard copy circulation model along with a free Internet model will really thrive in the future.
In the Washington, DC area, we've already seen the first fully subscription-free general circulation newspaper, the DC Examiner. It is entirely dependent on advertising. Circulated free to about 210,000 households, with another 50,000 copies given away through street boxes, if this paper catches on, say buh-bye to the Washington Post.
sitetest
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