Wednesday, January 20, 2010

The Future of Written News?

In an article by The New York Times, they announced that in 2011 they would start charging readers for certain amounts of content on NYTimes.com. They divided users into occasional users and frequent users. This proposed system would not charge for a couple articles being read by a person here and there. However, daily readers would be required to pay to continue to read the articles on their website.

Most comments about this article were negative and a large amount of people said that they would simply read the news elsewhere. Although, a few people accepted the fact that they will have to pay for this service in the future. Many news companies have been successful with charging for some online content such as The Wall Street Journal and Newsday.

Every newspaper seems to have websites that deliver news online for free nowadays. I think that as more people turn from paper to online most companies will need to charge for news. It would be interesting to investigate the approaches that local newspaper companies are taking toward this problem of decreasing subscriptions due to the internet.

2 comments:

  1. I posted about the same story. Your comment about how local news organizations will follow up on the Times experiment is interesting. The national papers will have a much broader following, and a few cents per hit could add up to a lot. A small local paper will have a smaller potential financial reward.

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  2. Also interesting is that the Times tried this before and then went back to entirely free content. I understand why they need to do this, but at the same time, I didn't pay back then, and there's a good chance I won't be paying when they make the change in 2011. I'll be waiting and watching to see how the landscape changes. It'd be great if news organizations could cover operating expenses with advertising, as the Times hoped to do. At the moment, though, advertising revenue isn't exactly going up in print OR online mediums.

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