Bricks & Clicks » What if you had to pay?

What if you had to pay?

February 11th, 2009 at 09:34am Jennie Pollock

Last week, our editor blogged about the Time article about “how to save your newspaper.” Some of it suggests that if there were an easy micropayment system, to “use as you go,” that the media could benefit.

This week, there’s a suggestion out there that newspapers should cease posting news to their Web sites for a week so that people would understand their value. A petition, actually. It certainly would pain Google and Yahoo, who feed all those headlines to their users.

Actually, there’s been a bunch of reaction to that Time story. Notably, Jon Stewart from “The Daily Show” suggests we use addictive ink. And an opinion that “news by the slice” won’t cut it.

1. the dude abides | February 11th, 2009 at 4:11 pm

I’d love to see you try it.

It’d be refreshing to see someone in Rockford do something, anything progressive instead of playing it safe.
2. Barbara | February 11th, 2009 at 9:03 pm

When I buy a newspaper or magazine I’m paying for a physical product, the delivery system for the content. Your online edition doesn’t have to be printed or delivered to subscribers or newsstands. This saves you money since you only have to post the article once and we do the work of coming to read it.

I’m not required to pay for the evening news on the local or national TV broadcasts. They use advertising revenue to support their broadcasts. Since newspaper and magazine websites also have ad revenue, please explain why you want us to pay without delivering a physical product?

I’ve heard that online ads don’t command the same prices as ads in the paper editions, but why not? You know how many views each page of your website(and therefore each ad) gets, and you can also track click-through numbers. This is more information than you can provide about your paper editions because you have no idea how many times the paper gets passed around or which pages and ads are actually seen.

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