Posted on 03/14/2005 6:04:15 AM PST by Drango
So the MSM can't come up with a sustainable revenue model to sell their lies online?
What does this say about them-- and their desired audience?
Maybe 'the unwashed masses' are too smart for them afterall?
Or the Washington Times. I love the content of the Wash. Times, but I'm mortified by it's ownership and provenance.
AND I get to choose how much to pay and how often (I contributed little for my first year or so, then pledged about $20 for a few FReepathons, was a dollar-a-day FReeper for over a year, and now throw in what I can when I can)...
Yeah, with that available, I'm sure everyone will opt for a flat charge of $79 per year for flat news with an idiotic slant and little actual content (how many times have you said to yourself, "Why doesn't this story answer more questions than it leaves open?" wfater reading a news story... and how many times after reading an FR thread?!?)
FR should be the future look of all news outlets.
problems i've noticed:
1. the composite readers' interest of national and international papers is higher than the interest of one paper. this is to say you have more to chose from on the internet than if you subscribe to one newspaper.
in contrast, your hometown paper looks boring. and, in many cases, it is boring because gannett and their ilk bought out many medium-sized city papers dumping the same junk in all of them.
2. but i could never afford to subscribe to all of the national and international papers that i take a look at.
3. there's been a general decline in most newspapers with the exception of the wall street journal and ibd. the decline owes to the boomer journalists' decisions in the early 1970s to abandon "objectivity" for personal opinion and fantasy.
don hewitt of 60 minutes actually said something to this effect. the "logic" of this follows: "everyone is biased, so i have a right as a journalist to publish my biases". the only problem is, most journalists issue from university j-schools which abandoned math, science, history, latin, greek, or economics for the fashionable "critical studies".
4. this is because feminists and "progressives" control most newspapers in the states. they gained their radicalism from their university educations which the vast majority of americans do not share.
to test #4--try to get most newspapers to publish anything that contradicts radical feminism and you'll see that it will not get published. is there a dr. laura schlesinger column in your local paper? rush limbaugh? nada.
in sum, until newspapers democratize and include the actual "diversity" of public opinion, and abandon their elitism, they'll continue to decline.
Dear Drango,
The Washington Times isn't bad, regarding content. The effort at presenting a conservative point of view is sometimes a bit labored. And the folks who write for the Washington Times are journalists, with all the bad stuff that implies. When they've reported on local stories with which I'm familiar, they do the usual thing that journalists do - report a large number of the facts, without any idea of how they actually go together.
However, the Washington Times won't survive the Internet, unless it gives up its paid subscription revenue. The Examiner, and papers that spring up like it, will ultimately eat away at the subscription base of paid subscription papers.
In the case of the Examiner, the conservative billionaire from out west who owns it reduced the costs he must amortize by buying printing assets from a local chain of community newspapers for a fraction of their original cost. As the costs associated with printing technology decline, he'll be better able to take advantage of them, because he will have less, by way of depreciable assets on the books, to write off.
On the other hand, his friends at the Washington Post and Washington Times will have printing assets purchased new, at full price, to write off.
The next ten years or so are going to be interesting. Dontcha think?
sitetest
I can't wait to flush what remains of your paper out of my system.
WSJ Ditto. Just wish I could get it earlier in the day.
If the Times charges for news, that will not impact the ability of FR members and weblogs to highlight articles and assess their accuracy under the "fair use" doctrine. All that will happen is that the Times will lose the advertising revenue that it gains from those readers at those times when they click through on advertisements.
I remember the worthless B2B auction sites that made you register and sign in to see what was for sale. Now I see the job sites that charge you for delivering mainly the same jobs that you can find for free on Monster.
There are ways to make money from free content with ads. These dinosaurs just need to figure out how to do it.
"For some publishers, it really sticks in the craw that they are giving away their content for free," said Colby Atwood, vice president of Borrell Associates Inc., a media research firm. The giveaway means less support for expensive news-gathering operations and the potential erosion of advertising revenue from the print side, which is much more profitable.
It's there fastest growing revenue source, yet this guy can't see the forest for the trees.
I think we have to look at the television model here: With TV we may pay for the transmission of programming, but we aren't paying for content, advertising pays for the content and on TV when you do pay for content, it's commercial free.
I already pay transmission fees (DSL hookup), but I will not pay for content. I think that newspapers are being "backward thinkers" and that they'll reap benefits from both consumers and commercial accounts if they go with the TV model.
I only buy the NYT when I run out of toilet paper.
Very apt and amusing.
I was contacted by a national polling company for the NYT about consumer reaction to charging for internet services. They apparently have several models for their coming changes.
I used to be a paid subscriber to their 'additional sections' to get their crosswords but quit when they went from $9 per year to almost $30.00.
Forgot the most important part of my previous post. Although I still read some of their stuff and occasionally go on their forums to drive the Libs nuts, I told them I'd NEVER go to their site if I had to pay for it--and I won't.
First, we're not giving information, it's being taken from us by the use of tracking software. If the government used the same techniques, the MSM would be screaming. 'Wasn't this the same bunch all concerned that someone would find out what library books we read? And they're the same group that uses tracking software to watch everything we read, look at, or buy.
"And forum posters and bloggers are illegitimate sources of information and they need to be regulated." Yep, MSM is in deep trouble and we're in their sites. We need to fight web censorship and taxation.
Advertising revenue from online sites is booming and, while it accounts for only 2 percent or 3 percent of most newspapers' overall revenues
Over 50% of their readers are online yet it only pays them 3%. The market is telling them how much their hard left bias is worth.
The NYT is often calling themselves “The Times” as in this article:
The Times's (sic) Web site had
Executives at The Times have
and The Times would
Isn’t there a UK newspaper who’s actual name is “The Times” and wouldn’t this infringe on there trade name somehow?
It's worse than that. I have the Denton paper delivered to my door everyday, and I didn't even sign up for the damn thing.
So it goes into the gutter
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