Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model?

Eric Smalley asks: "Wanted: an online publishing business model that falls somewhere between lone weblogger and corporate media behemoth. Technology Research News (TRN) has been publishing original news stories for over five years, but we have yet to find a way to cover our costs. We are fairly popular and well-woven into the fabric of the Web; we have over 200,000 unique visitors per month, we are well represented in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results, and we are regularly slashdotted and pointed to by Wired News, other media sites and countless weblogs. Our overriding goal has been to keep the news free, including our archive. Is there no place for a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists?" "We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition, selling white-paper-like reports through our site and resellers, supplying other media sites with our content through a newswire, selling subscriptions to an off-line electronic edition through a reseller, collecting fees from Lexus Nexis and other online databases, and carrying Google's Adsense advertisements. Most recently we have begun a PBS-like fund drive. That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough. Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers."

Comments

submissions

[shmlco]

"In other words, you have no full-time field reporters. You're not going out there and finding new stories, you're repackaging stuff from other sources."

Ah... I believe you're completely ignoring the concept of article SUBMISSIONS, by writers who ARE out in the field. Reading, rejecting, accepting, and editing article submissions is what editors get paid to do.

So unless you believe that every article in every magazine has to be written by a staff writer to be original, your assumption falls rather short of actual fact.

With "insights" like that, one can see why you post as an Anonymous Coward...