Charging for Web site?

You're right. I meant to make that point, too.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter is not exactly Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. There is a difference between reading and reading, if you know what I mean.

 

Well, they drove most of the smaller, indy bookstores right out of business, that's why. People who read and want the tactile experience of sampling the book before they buy, where else can they go but the big chains in most towns? I knew it was fucking over when I visited New Haven a few years ago and saw that the Yale student bookstore is a goddamn B&N. In the 1990s I bought a book about how to start a bookstore. Today I think starting a newspaper would be a less risky proposition than starting a bookstore in most cities, which is pretty sad indeed.

Even if bookstores were sprouting up everywhere, I'm not sure we could make the jump to saying people are better informed. A lot of people who buy books -- even a lot of non-fiction readers -- are seeking either an escape from their personal reality rather than the daily encounter with it that local news provides, or they want a validation of preconceptions rather than a challenge to them. Even on the Web, I don't think people are informed as much as they are infotained. In general. Yeah, I think people are dumber as a whole despite having a world of verbiage at their fingertips.

 

There's still an independent book store in my town, but they also sell cigars and pipes. Interesting combo.

 

I expected some of the criticisms.
My main point is why continue to give away coverage for free and still expect to stay in business. As advertising in newspapers remains the main source of income, not advertising on Web sites, there should be some way to connect the two products to make both more profitable and create more advertising opportunities to bring in more revenues. If most people now read newspaper's content on the Web, which is given away for free, how will either stay in business in the long term?
It just seems there could be a way to package both (sales on the internet and newspaper), and no longer give the news away on the Web for free. If readers are always going to need the local news and can't get it anywhere else except the local paper's Web site, then readers may be willing to pay $.25 a day for unlimited access to the paper's Web site and maybe there could be a way to package a newspaper subscription too. I'm sure I'm dreaming here, but maybe the strictly internet users would find something in the paper they want, but haven't been willing to give a chance.
I'm sure there are a lot of things I haven't considered with this course of action, but doesn't it seem like it might be time to try something new?

 

Interesting perspective on a possible way to charge for news content from Time:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191-1,00.html

The point raised here of many people wanting just a handful of news instead of the whole package is a good one. And perhaps this suggestion by time of the "per story" charge could work in some markets. If I had an almost iTunes like setup for my NY Times content (assuming I was a regular reader) and was able to one-click pay 5 cents for each one I wanted, I might just do it. Sure, it won't work everywhere, but it's an idea.

 

A d_b of epic proportions.

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/66663/

 

But you're assuming it's one-and-done for the tweens. They'll move on to other reading material once they've gotten their fill. So no, it's not award-winning lit, but if it gets so many people started, you've got to give it credit for that.

 

I think you have to sell as a complete package if you're going to sell it at all. Because if you charge by the story, some beancounter is going to start thinking that you need to pay staff according to how many views each story gets. First, it would be chaos -- witness Gawker. And also no one will be willing to do lower-profile (but necessary) stories. No one will be willing to spend weeks or months pursuing a story. No one's going to want to make extra efforts at verification -- just throw it out there, the wilder the better. And then there will be NO difference between a professional news organization and the average blog. I'm aware it's a business. But if each story becomes all about the money, the industry deserves to die. Because newspapers will have lost all sense of serving their communities.

 

Newspaper sites that have tried to restrict content based on subscriptions - supposed "premium" content - have for the most part stopped the practice.

There are just too many options from which to choose to have people pay.

It would take all the newspaper sites to agree to start charging at the same time for it to be effective.

And that would be price-fixing, wouldn't it?

 

Oddly, it would be price-fixing to agree to discontinue what had been a free service, even if they didn't fix a specific price -- in other words, even if the rate varied.

But I disagree that papers would have to act at the same time. Papers in markets with little or no competition would not need other media's cooperation to being charging.

 

I don't believe posting content on the web for free is giving the content away for free any more than charging 50 cents for a newspaper is. That 50 cents isn't for the content of the paper, it's for the delivery.

 

Depends on which newspaper sites you're talking about. The newspaper I work for continues to charge to see our complete stories and electronic edition of the paper online, while putting up snippets of our stories in an effort to pique interest. And we do have folks who subscribe just online, although I imagine most of those are folks who have moved away and want to keep up on what's going on in their old hometown.
Of course, we're not the New York Times by a longshot, either.