In a coda to my old Elephant Diaries series on the economics of news, a brief note from Dallas as the Morning News goes paywall:
“Local newspaper websites are never going to scale to page view levels that make the math work,” he said. “The volume of traffic to these sites is inherently limited by the geographic nature of the content they published.”
Hmmm…also reminds me of this quote, “Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.” – Fran Lebowitz
I believe that there will always be a role for REAL newspapers…but there aren’t many of those left. And, they all need a strategy for integrated online/offline content access. Some pubs can and do make paywalls work, because of the content. (Duh, Mary)
I subscribe to the Daily NYT (which also gives me/will give access behind paywalls) – NOT for breaking news but for solid, well-researched reporting with adult-level details and entertaining, enriching writing about topics I might not otherwise ever think about, much less read. And, reading it in 3-D, flipping pages, scanning topics, tearing out articles…is a whole different (and engaging) experience than reading online.
I don’t, however, subscribe to the Albuquerque Journal because – well, there’s no there there.