This New England

And so it begins. The Newport Daily News will soon bar access to its Web site except for paid subscribers. You'll see a wave of this sort of thing this year among U.S. daily newspapers -- stressed by a deep advertising recession (and publications have long been far too dependent on advertising, as opposed to readers loyal enough to pay more of the freight themselves for high-quality, actionable journalism).

The long and generally disastrous approach of giving away expensively gathered news may be coming to end, as papers realize there's no real business model there. Certainly not enough revenue to maintain the large newsrooms of yore. Crooks in government and business are very happy with this development.

Next stop: A wave of industrial-strength lawsuits against the search engines --- especially Google and Yahoo -- for hourly taking without payment vast quantities of copyrighted newspaper and magazine material and making money off it. It's rather like a steel company getting free iron ore.

To quote from today's Newport Daily News:

.."Daily News officials point out that the 'give-it-away-for-free' model has not worked for the nation's newspapers. In fact, offering free content online has been a contributing factor in the declining circulation of the printed newspaper, which, combined with rising expenses and the recession, has resulted in layoffs and other cost-saving measures, they said.''

 Tags  charge for access Google Newport Daily News online Web site Yahoo

Comments

nostradamus said:

Next step for Newport Daily News.

Charge $5 a week for reading it on the web, also for buying newspaper

But if you refuse to pay to read it online, or buy a paper a $10 a week charge on your credit card.

Link | May 21, 2009 1:56 PM
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