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Washington Post To Go Paywall, Along With Buffett-Owned Local Papers
McGruber writes "The Washington Post reports that the Washington Post, and local newspapers owned by Warren Buffett, are all planning to follow the New York Times and install metered paywalls." Buffett's got more than 80 papers right now, and hasn't quit buying them. There's some time to read the WaPo sans paywall, but by mid-year it may be up.
With the easy access to quality international newspapers why would one use Washington Post?
Firefox rules. I have been using addons refcontrol to take care of paywalled websites like nytimes.com, wsj.com etc.
linky: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
Anybody know how to tell Google News "don't show me paywall sites?" Or to blacklist sites in some way?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
And upi. That's what most news articles are, reprints of what they buy from the three big news gathering organizations
Local news? Between blogs, twitter and aol's push into local news there is no reason to pay for news
Was once quoted a few years ago that he didn't invest in technology companies like Microsoft because he didn't understand how they operated.
Apparently his knowledge of how the Internet works hasn't improved much since then.
What am I missing? Is there separate pages that paid subscribers are seeing that I am not? More articles available? What?
The NYTimes paywall is intended to let everybody read a limited number of articles per month with no hassle at all - exceed the limit and you run into a paywall on all of their articles. The thing is that it relies on cookies in your browsers to keep track of how many articles you've read. So, if you do things like spoof your referrer to be google and never let their website set a cookie, you are unlikely to ever be hassled by their paywall.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Fact is, the more business out there struggles to come to terms with the internet and what people do with it, the more it becomes apparent which will adapt and which will need to be replaced.
There is a big hint offered in how business perceives the net. If they see it as a threat and attempt to battle it, they will lose.
I can't blame the Washington Post. This isn't an isolated move. News publishers throughout the West are fighting to have some pay mechanism in place, either through legilsation, such as in France and Germany, or through paywalls, in English-speaking speaking countries like the US and UK.
A single paper restricting access to its free news service isn't bad. It may impove its bottom line. But imagine what would happen if the majority of the online publications in the West decide to go the pay-before-you-read route? Then more and more people who want to read the news online would go to the remaining free news sources. And guess what? There are organization than would be more than eager to fill the vacuum.
Russia, China, and the news or propoganda organizations of other authoritarian/totalitarian countires can well afford to subsidize online sites that can broadcast or publish their outlook on world events. They just need a little more time to polish off their English, make it sound less like party propaganda and apparat-speak. Perhaps a brand name change would is also in order, if names like Russia Today and China Central TV sound pretty ominous to citizens of Western liberal democracies.
Let's just hope that relatively unbiased news sites like the BBC remain "free" for the rest of the world to read.
So the King of spreading the wealth (Mr. Tax Me More) has no problem with giving away other people's money, but when it comes to his own things, he doesn't want to give them away? Say it ain't so!
I guess I'll be using Bugmenot with WP like I have with the NY TImes for years.
One is the the internet, the second is every newspaper is simply recycling stories from UPI, Reuters, and AFP
For the most part, the New York Times doesn't recycle wire service stories. That's part of their charm. Neither does the Washington Post, (but I prefer the Times). There are a lot of papers out there who rely on wire services for anything that's not local news-- and those papers are probably unsustainable.
You could always try The Daily Mail A surprising number of people outside the UK think it's a real newspaper.
I stopped subscribing to physical newspapers as soon as their content hit over 50% advertising on the normal news pages, and they became nothing more than a cheaper-than-the-USPS method for distributing sales circulars and coupons.
Electronic publishers, including those for eBooks, and not just limited to "eNewspapers", have become nearly unreadable, because they no longer employ actual, human editors to correct spelling and grammatical errors; if I have to correct it in my head, that's work I'm doing that they should be doing before I even see it.
The eNewspapers are even more egregiously failing me than eBooks, since for non-fiction, their fact checking is seriously lacking -- not that the print versions are doing any better in this regard.
The profession of investigative journalism of the type practiced by Neil Sheehan, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein is effectively dead in todays news media. The closest you will see is the occasional television journalistic "scoop", in which a whistle-blower has effectively handed the story to the likes of 60 Minutes, with a bow on it, and they ran with the story because it lacked sufficient controversy to get them in legal hot water.
A pay wall will likely not get me to read this eTripe any more than I already do, which is best characterized as "infrequently at best", and will certainly disincentivize me further if, on paying the fee, I find that there are still large tracts of ads fighting for my attention as they attempt to further monetize my already monetized eyeballs.
Look, morons, it's very simple:
(1) Provide your ad-blasted tripe for free
(2) Write stories that have more depth than their first sentence, or you will not be seeing me click through
(3) Hire some damn editors
(4) Clearly mark syndicated vs. non-syndicated content
(5) Let me have a try-before-I-buy time limited subscription without asking for my billing details up front; I do not have a business relationship with you unless I like you
(6) Profit!!!!
Do I think this model will work for you? Not long term, as the New York Times is in the process of demonstrating. So approach the problem a different way.
Personally, I would prefer that you just syndicate your original content through Google, and concentrate on that, rather than fitting it in the column inches of syndicated content I can get anywhere else I happen to look. Let Google or whoever emerges as "the one new portal" pay your syndication fees out of their ad revenue, and leave me the hell out of it.
You need to realize that you are not going to do ad serving better than Google does it. Just give the hell up now, and do what you can do better than Google (and do it before Google gets better at it than you are because you are running around with no focus).
And hire some damn editors. If my 6th grade niece can point out your grammar faux pas, you should damn well be able to hire someone with an English degree, whose other options for a career would otherwise be limited to either making more people with English degrees or asking me "would you like fries with that?" to fix your spelling and grammar.
Oh, and finally: some idiots blog doesn't count as news, so leave their publication to Blogspot, and stick with actual news, please.
I live in NoVA too...and Buffet is shutting down our local paper (News & Messenger). This ends actually having an idea of what's going on in the county/locally.
I believe that the newspaper industry's underlying problems existed before the internet. Yes, the internet exacerbated them and sped up the collapse, but they were around before the internet. I believe that, even without the internet, these problems would've eventually hit newspaper publishing revenues, but it would've taken longer to do so.
First question... what was the newspaper business model? For many advertisers, newspapers were the only source of eyeballs for their products/services before the internet. Newspapers used their print advertising monopoly to charge extremely high ad rates, which paid for...
* the cost of printing/running the ad
* paying reporters and foreign correspondents all over the country and around the world
* and a nice fat 30%+ annual ROI for shareholders
In plain English, newspapers effectively levied a tax on advertisers. This defacto "advertising-tax" paid for newspaper journalism, among other things.
The newspaper business model, which subsidized journalism, could be attacked by advertisers getting their products/services in front of customer eyeballs by a method other than newspaper ads ("advertising-tax avoidance"). The "advertising-tax avoidance" scenario played out over the years...
* "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates.
* Right now in Toronto (where I live) there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc. The ads paid for by employers are sufficient.
* Back in the mid-1980's, when I was looking for a place to live in Toronto, I found "The Real Estate Weekly". It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real
estate firms came out ahead.
* Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). The original reason was that it was a pain for a national outfit to co-ordinate running the same ad at the same time at dozens of papers across the country, or even a region. Also, there were some newspapers that didn't have 4-colour presses, and were physically incapable of printing the multicoloured ad inserts. Then the national chains found out that it cost a lot less to do their own printing, and let the newspapers do the physical delivery. Then, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either...
- have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units)
- or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings
Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Warren Buffet despite his foibles as we know is a crazy good investor. The question in my mind is why invest in newspapers when there is some evidence that they are a dying business model. On one hand, there is always going to be a need for news (and writers / journalists) but a much more decentralized model seems to rule day as many of the blogs do (such as Huffington Post). I would be really interested in knowing what his game play is as far as the newspapers are concerned. It could be they simply allow him to play in the political arena at a higher level than before.
I'm not a fan of Warren Buffet at all as he despite his carefully nurtured "grandfather" demeanor plays real hardball and screws people left and right. (The lady who used to own Business Wire got screws IMHO as she just sold it to him cheap simply because she liked his "grandfatherness.") In addition, he is well known for advocating higher taxes on the "wealthy" on one hand and not paying his taxes on the other. As many say: "Watch what Warren Buffet does -- not what he says."
Funny you should use the example of Woodward and Bernstein, as they were handed a journalistic "scoop", in which a whistle-blower handed the story to the likes of the Washington Post with a bow on it.
Funny, even back in the good old days journalists were exactly the way you criticize them for being today...I think that's called "false nostalgia" or something.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
When most people hit a pay wall, here is what we do: Copy title of article we wanted to read, past it into google, read what google gives us from another source that is offering it for free.