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Newsday Gets 35 Subscriptions To Pay Web Site
Hugh Pickens writes "In late October, Newsday put its web site behind a pay wall, one of the first non-business newspapers to take the pay wall plunge, so Newsday has been followed with interest in media circles anxious to learn how the NY Times own plans to put up a pay wall may work out. So how successful has Newsday's paywall been? The NY Observer reports that three months into the experiment only 35 people have signed up to pay $5 a week to get unfettered access to newsday.com. Newsday's web site redesign and relaunch reportedly cost about $4 million and the 35 people who've signed up have earned Newsday about $9,000. Still publisher Terry Jimenez is unapologetic. 'That's 35 more than I would have thought it would have been,' said Jimenez to his assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday employees. The web project has not been a favorite among Newsday employees who have recently been asked to take a 10 percent pay cut. 'The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks,' says one staffer. 'It's an abomination,' adds another."
Ha! Take that long standing respectable media. Funny, I'd bet they'd be better off without a website at all. Now there is a way to fix this, though I'm interested in feedback before I try to do anything about it. What we need is a micro-payment aggregation service combined with an advertisement blocking proxy server. Opera is doing the rebuilding on the fly for smaller and faster page loads, and if they combined that with an ad-blocking service for $10/yr and had a "$.02" payment button that sites like Newsday could contract for, then everybody would win.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Horrible business model aside... it should be noted that anyone with Optimum Online (cablevision's ISP, basically the only cable ISP on Long Island) can access Newsday for free. (Newsday is owned by Cablevision.) So it's not like 35 people are "subscribed" .... 35 people are paying extra for it.
It's always confirmation bias!
Nobody is going to pay for a news site for the most part. You can easily get the same news elsewhere for free. The only places I've seen people pay for something like this is cable TV. The reason for that is because you had too to get all the major content.
The reason you can't do that with websites is that any old Joe can't create a TV station, but they can create a news website. If Newssite1.com makes you pay, everyone will go to Newssite2.com to get the same information free.
For the record, they sell access to the web site for $5 per week, while they sell the paper for $4.50 including access to the web site. Basically those 35 subscribers are paying 50 cents per day to not get the paper delivered. They also give free access to all people who subscribe to the local cable provider -- which is a lot of people for the local paper.
Plus it's Newsday.....
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
If you read the article (I know, I know) you'll discover that 75% of the people in the region already have access to the site via package deals:
So it's actually surprising that 35 people did sign up for it. I'm guessing they are people that moved from Long Island to other places and, for whatever reason, miss reading Newsday. I know it's popular to scream that newspapers are dying, but this is not really a story that supports that supposition.
newspapers are dead....
People who have their local paper delivered to their door every morning by a real life 'person' tend to pay $5 or less a week so why is the online site so expensive?..
$5 a week? How much for a dead-wood version?
Man Shot Dead By Saloon ... To read more subscribe to the Deadwood Version of Newsday
... To read more subscribe to the Deadwood Version of Newsday
Wild Bill Hickok and those two guys that stole downstairs to save the squarehead kid; tell Ned to stick around so they see what the kid has to say about him. Then he throws down against Hickok and this other cocksucker who draws almost as fast, so it's a toss-up who blew Ned's head off.
Opinion: On the Existence of Whiskey
Some goddamn point a man's due to stop arguing with his-self and feeling twice the goddamn fool he knows he is 'cause he can't be something he tries to be every goddamn day without once getting to dinnertime and fucking it up. I don't want to fight it anymore, understand me reader? And I don't want you pissing in my ear about it. Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?
My work here is dung.
That's how I have heard this categorized here in the NY area. See, if you are a Cablevision/Optimum Online sub, you get Newsday Online for free. "That's a $260 Value -- If You Sign Before Midnight Tonight!"
Remember, Newsday is owned by The Dolans, the certifiably insane family that also owns and/or operates Madison Square Garden, the Knicks, the Rangers, the Liberty, Clearview Cinemas, the Beacon Theater, Radio Friggin' Music Hall, and prolly my toaster oven as well, haven't checked lately. This isn't about love or money for the newspaper, this is about things like "synergies" and "paradigms" and "leverage." These are the kind of robber baron sociopaths who would burn an orphanage they own to the ground if the price of diapers got higher than they had budgeted, or they needed to light a lot of their cigars at once and they only had one match left.
Newsday used to be an award winning newspaper. In the 80's there was a very good New York City edition (New York Newsday). They had some truly great writers. The paper actually reported news in the journalistic tradition. Currently, it is owned by Cablevision (following nearly going under thanks in no small part to a circulation/advertising scandal), the size of it's print edition has been shrunk to near comic book size, and while there are still some very talented people writing for the paper, the tone of the paper has really swung to the hard right (as opposed to being somewhat objective). Why anyone would pay for the print edition is beyond me, so I don't know what made them think anyone would pony up for the electronic version. And unless I'm mistaken, current subscribers to "Optimum Online" (Cablevision's Internet offering) can view the Newsday website gratis.
It's a terribly designed site. At first glance, you can't tell what are links, and what is just plain text. There are just about zero visual clues as to where you should go, what you should do, or what you should be reading. There seems to be no coherent logic to the layout, either, and the dark background with white text does them no favours. If they paid $4 million for this, they got ripped off.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Read a regular newpaper story in an area where you're an expert. Notice how sloppy they are? How careless with the facts? People have complained about this for ages, but there wasn't much you could do about it. Most communities only had one or two papers to choose from.
Today, though, there's a huge market in online news, and, for the most part, the market seems to have set the price at "free." (That's free as in beer, of course.) It is difficult for me to believe that the market has got the price wrong. (Again, with a few exceptions.)
--Greg
$260 a year for access to a B-list newspaper site? Really? The Wall Street Journal online only is $110/year ant they're The Wall Street Journal.
Good luck.
but not for opinions on an AP story.
Give me investigative journalism that is reasonably unbiased and you have a lifetime subscriber.
Give me right or left slanted takes on a WH press release or random blogger's "news story" and you're worse than useless to me.
It's obvious that the current situation is fragile and the media is changing, but what's the solution?
To recap:
So how can the newspapers provide content and pay for the bills?
It's easy to dismiss the media as being obsolete and that you can find the information for free anyway, but let's consider something: almost all bloggers and "new media" hipsters get the info from the old media anyway. There's precious little actual content created by bloggers and enthusiasts and it's very difficult to do so.
Case in point, I researched for weeks on info about the software used in the making of Avatar and some technical details. I got the info by finding the companies involved via IMDB, talking to people involved and basically scrapping bits and pieces into a coherent article. Then Cinefex magazine came out with so much more information, all my work looks ridiculous.