Slashdot Mirror
More Online Publishers Inching Toward Paid Content
mattmcal writes "TheStreet.com reported its first quarterly profit with $18 million of its $26 million in revenues coming from subscriptions. WSJ.com is now up to 686,000 online subscribers. Several publishers have failed to build successful paid models in the past, such as the San Jose Mercury News, but subscription revenue is crucial during ad market dips. More and more publishers are testing these waters now that the evidence of success has become real. Washingtonpost.com and Media Guardian UK both announced recently they will require registration. This may be just the beginning of a mad rush to drop a registration gate on the major news sites."
Lexis-Nexis has been doing this for a long time, and making a nice profit. It's not new.
Worth looking at paidcontent.org </a> which give a 3rd party view of subscription services
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"The for-pay WSJ makes its editorial content available for free at opinionjournal.com, because nobody would pay to read editorials ..."
That's not quite right. OpinionJournal has articles not found on the WSJ and vice versa. If you go to OpinionJournal and click on the "also on the WSJ" link, you will find editorial links to articles for WSJ subscribers only.
I for one find the WSJ editorials one of its most valuable sections -- with a lot of Pulitzers under its belt -- as do many subscribers I know. It is really a matter of personal ideology, you see. Non-conservatives will not want to throw any money at a conservative editorial page. So while conservatives might find the WSJ's editorials worth subscribing to, if conservatives want to reach non-conservatives they will want to provide free content. Hence WSJ vs Opinion Journal.
I can't say I care at all about the traditional media companies locking themselves behind barriers. I only read weblogs anyway.
I suppose it might be a self defense manoever for them - it stops them from having to look like complete idiots when some blogger points out they made something up, or spun a story beyond recognition.
As long as you can read maybe three commercial news sources, you can can tell what all the others are saying anyway. Commercial news is designed to package and disseminate the same information to many people, rather than many different kinds of information about the same event. It's a horrible model, and it suffers particularly badly from the "who guards the guardians" syndrome.
I have little or no respect for the traditional media, so here is one person that won't be crying if they decide to marginalise themselves.
Some forms of paid-for news are probably worthwhile, but on the whole I can't help feeling that the weblog phenomenon is the first sign of a drastic change in how people will get their news in the future.
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Some people don't have time to rewrite a nicely worded article, so they post a link to someone else's. I think your also forgetting about sites that provide their own content like Ars Technica and HardOCP which were smallfry's a few years back. The number of "E-zines" and blog sites are continually growing, so people will less and less quote from the Times, The New Scientist or the BBC because they'll find the news elsewhere. And more so if the big fish want to inconvenience their readership with registration.
And then you'll have content that noone has written something up for, so that gives the reader his/her chance to be famous for a day. Look!!! I just found a nice layout of a Terra V rocket. Some people might find this interesting, regardless of the credibility of me or the site. Or take someone's writeup of RoboSapien, or someone else plugging his own webblog because he received a check from the RIAA, or someone plugging their personal coverage of the CodeCon conference, etc. This notion of credibility-by-link should have been shattered as soon as you saw this troll get posted.
Your statement is analagous to the trustworthiness of proprietary code because the corporation is credible or well known. Which means on the flipside that because many open-source coders aren't "credible", then the code should not be trustworthy. Both are bad logic, and sometimes slashdot mods are like that after going through a mind-numbing XY,000+ submissions per day, but it doesnt hold true enough to call it law.
...small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri...