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The Fate of The Free Newspaper
jm92956n writes "We've all become accustomed to the wide availability of newspapers and other media online, almost all of which is available for free. Today, however, The New York Times (free registration required; how ironic!) is running an article that questions the long term viability of that business model. Interestingly, the Times now has more online readers than print readers. Is the era of free news content about to end?"
What about people who read the paper on the train or bus? I have no desire to get my laptop out or have to read articles on a tiny mobile phone screen just to get my dose of news in a morning. I think newspapers in print will be a round a while yet, just to serve the needs of the communter. I couldn't survive my journey into Manchester without the Metro, and the letters page is always hilarious!
As long as paper is cheaper than video screens there will be free papers. Case in point, Washing, DC just gained a new free daily The Washington Examiner in the last month, and within the last two year the Washington Post launched its own freebie paper, The Express.
They both seem to have viable business models and in fact the Express has already decimated small group of targetted suburban papers that had cost $.35 which have now either gone out print, or or free depending on the suburban county each served. And the Post is finding that its free paper is doing better than it is. Though I think that growth will slow because of the Examiner which seems closer to a real newspaers (if one only on par to the NY Post or NY News) than the Express which consists entirely of heavily cropped wire stories. The Examiner at least has unique features and few of its own writers - plus it runs in depth wire stories, especially in SPORTS - which with the launch of the Washington Nationals should 'sell' a lot of free papers.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Is the era of free news content about to end?
No, here in Washington DC in the last year we have seen the launch of 2 free newspapers, dailies in fact. The Post's Express and the Examiner. Add that to the Citypaper and we have three.
We are quite saturated with free news.
Every time someone is trying to charge for a service on the internet, another provider will emerge and offer it for free. That free service will inevitably will be viewed more and gain credibility.
It's the same story. Nothing to see here, move along!
It's all about tactility, presence, something real, that you can have and hold and possess. I don't care what anyone says, tactility brings a measure of comfort and pleasure you're not going to get from a screen. Then there's the smell of a fresh paper. I'm not saying that it's up there with the smell of frying bacon in the morning, but it adds to the experience. That's it - a print paper is an experience, text on a screen is just, boring...
That's odd; the New York Times just bought half of the Boston Metro, a freely distributed paper.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
The newspapers adopt an Oracle-like pricing model for advertisers (since billions of people CAN see your ad online, we'll charge you $$$ for it to appear there) which hurts them. Their real problem is that newspaper management are old-school newpaper guys who think in terms of the circulation of folded 11x19 sheets.
That's BS. Papers are advertising-delivery mechanisms, always have been.
If the papers actually thought about finding ways of putting their "real" paper advertisements (ie. NOT click-thrus) in the online edition, they'd have more effective advertising.
Alot of people actually pay for papers just for the ads. I often buy the Sunday paper just for the supermarket flyers and department store ads.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
It should work like the Economist.com. Most material is free excepting the business intelligence (Oxymoron? You decide.), but everything else is available for viewing. Like /. most newspapers could market timeliness, and make everything else available without a subscription.
As always, the porn industry is leading the way in online commerce.
Very recently I've noticed "Adult Friend Finder" ads are doing this -- the ads say "find women in XXX", where X is a suburb near me ... after freaking for a moment I realised that's where my ISP was.
>I assure you the BBC is biased.
I am not sure that "unbiased" in a possibility. Any reporting always puts a slant on things.
>Most news in the U.S. skews to the left.
I am not sure that "most" is that meaningful, but it depends on where you compare to. My experience on US news is that it is fairly right wing. But this, in turn, is just reflective of US society, which is to the right on my own country (the UK). However, most of the national media outlets are on the coasts, which tend to be the most left wing parts of the US. So compared to the US population as a whole, it probably is slightly left slanted.
Incidentally, the Marxist assumption would not be that "owned by someone means conservative". It would be that because a news source is owned by someone, it will generally operate to the benefit of the owner, rather than society at large, whether that is conservative or otherwise. This is, I think, probably fair. The BBC has it's bias as well, but at least this is different from the prevailing news media, which is no bad thing.
Phil
And it's not just newspapers. While I agree that most magazines are fluff, I certainly love to have stacks of various journals (usually biology/science/astronomy related) around that I can peruse on a lazy Sunday afternoon and not have to worry about if the image server is down, the website address has changed, or the search is working on a particular site. I can't count the number of times when I've googled for something, gone to the site and get a glarin "Bandwidth exceeded", or 404 not found, or no pictures (just ugly red X's), etc.
I'd love if all journals/newspapers also did a complete "digitization" of their materials and released a yearly compendium on CD/DVD (just for quick searches), but nothing still quite beats the actual FEEL of reading a good paper-based product.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I might consider paying for an "all you can eat" system that gave me access to vast quantities of premium content, but I am NOT going to be nickeled and dimed to death with "micropayments" to every Tom Dick and Harry who thinks his useless two cents worth should be billed to the reader at that rate. When's the last time you actually read some "news" online that required anything other than the most superficial fact gathering? Half these idiots can't get the easy facts right, let along getting to the bottom of a complex story. And the day Google starts routing me to pay-per-view pages without clearly notifying me in advance is the day I find another search engine. Some of you folks need to go back and reread the Cluetrain Manifesto.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen any DHTML techniques that counter ad blocking. I envision Alice clicking on a story and getting only the first paragraph because she has blocked the ads from that site while Bob gets the whole story because an ad that he is not blocking is rewriting the DOM to display or download the rest of the story. I think that coupled with a server side counter of the number of times the ad was actually displayed might be the basis for a better ad revenue model than pay per click.
I think innerHTML, HttpXmlRequest, and so on would be available on any browser with ad blocking capability. I think with something like this, and the user ability to turn ad blocking on and off by web site, we'd end up with marketplace forces determining what is acceptable in advertising.
Let's look at the business model. Where do newpaper revenues come from? Subscribers? No. Advertisers. The only reason that newspapers charge for their paper editions is protect against the age old assumption that if it's free, it must be worthless.
Every newspaper in the country could give away their print editions and still make money.
The "news business" is not now, nor has it ever been, about bringing you the news. It has always been about selling advertisements.
Just because a business provides something that is of use to one set of customers does not mean that that customer base is their primary concern.
The big reason that papers want to keep you, the reader happy, is so they can sell you to more advertisers.
I want all of the power and none of the responsibility.