More Newspaper Industry Musings

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, December 11, 2009 @ 4:05 pm

photo credit: dno1967

There's a good article over at the Guardian entitled Memories of a Paywall Pioneer by former Salon.com managing editor Scott Rosenberg. He reflects on Salon's experiences with various subscription and advertising strategies and muses on how Rupert Murdoch's move to charge for content is likely to play out. I especially like this succinct formulation of the bad business strategy being followed by "old media":

I start with the assumption that internet-based media will gradually come to dominate news distribution and consumption over the next, say, quarter-century. TV and print won't vanish but they will steadily lose readers, influence and revenue. They ought to be using their "legacy" revenue to fund the expansion of their online presence and experiments; instead, they seem today to be eager to squeeze their online operations for revenue to subsidize the old newsroom. It's the same kind of short-term thinking that has already allowed so many newcomers and interlopers to seize their readers and advertisers.

His point that once readers get it in their heads that your site is "closed" to them, they hardly ever come back, should give Rupert pause.

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