SFG75
Well-Known Member
This is an excellent article that is very worthy of discussion. The author maintains that newspapers are falling aprt as the three-headed monster of their income is slowly dying. Newsstands and subscriptions are being replaced by free online content. Instead of buying the New York Times to read Paul Krugman, you could just read his article hyperlinked on the huffingtonpost or on the NYT site iteself. This leaves the last leg-avertising, for newspapers to stand on. This isn't enough to employ a legion of editors, reporters, and investigative personnel needed to run a great paper.
So what are the solutions?
The author maintains some sort of pay portal thing where you could buy an article for a small amount of mone, or the daily content for dollar or two a day. The problem with that is this, people are already getting tha content for FREE and will they only go to the sites that are free and that make money through advertising? How do you compensate a Krugman, a great editor, or other journalists if the content is free?
So what are the solutions?
The author maintains some sort of pay portal thing where you could buy an article for a small amount of mone, or the daily content for dollar or two a day. The problem with that is this, people are already getting tha content for FREE and will they only go to the sites that are free and that make money through advertising? How do you compensate a Krugman, a great editor, or other journalists if the content is free?
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.