Nieman Journalism Lab: The right information, the right way, at the right time
Monday, 1 March 2010, 17:12
"At 5:30 a.m., I got a text message from one of my local television stations alerting me that my kids’ school was closed because of an impending snowstorm. This was a valuable bit of information. …. This TV station gave me the specific information I wanted the way I wanted it and when I wanted it. …"
Reuters: The economics of the New York Times paywall
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:50
Felix Salmon: "it’ll be much easier to change the number of articles that people can read for free than it will be to change the price of a monthly or annual subscription. … the experience of the FT suggests that there’s a strong temptation to [gradually reduce the number of free articles per month]: it has been dialing down n to a very low level, as it becomes increasingly addicted to online subscription revenue."
NewsFuturist: Ask the right questions about paid content plans
Thursday, 6 August 2009, 19:40
Jeff Sonderman: "The huge fallacy I hear all the time behind arguments for requiring readers to pay for news goes like this: Our work is IMPORTANT and EXPENSIVE to produce. Society needs it, and we incur huge expenses to provide it, so consumers should pay us. …
Price is determined by the UNIQUE value your product provides TO THE CONSUMER. Both parts of the equation matter: how useful/valuable is it to the consumer, and could the same value be obtained elsewhere for less? Regarding news online, the second question is key."
John McQuaid: On newspapers and paywalls
Saturday, 6 June 2009, 11:57
"If your starting point is the assumption your product has “value,” you’d be wise to take a hard look at exactly what that value is on the open market. But the API evidently has not conducted that kind of clear-eyed self-assessment. It sees the economic value of newspaper content as self-evident, of a piece with its perceived social value, and something that must be preserved first, improved upon later."
Charlie Beckett: News Is Like Water (guest post)
Saturday, 6 June 2009, 06:33
Eli Lipmen: "[The] efforts last week by the newspapers to figure out a ‘models to monetize content’ will ultimately be doomed by their inability, unlike their [wire service] predecessors in the 19th century, to control the distribution of knowledge because they cannot monopolize the lines of transmission."
Editor & Publisher: Get Out of the Printing Business, Moody’s Tells Newspapers
Saturday, 6 June 2009, 06:32
"Unless newspapers can figure out how to reduce their high fixed costs of printing and circulation, their already low credit ratings could fall even farther, Moody's Investors Service warns in a report relased Thursday. … Moody's calls it a "structural disconnect" with just 14% of cash operating costs, on average, devoted to content creation, while about 70% of costs are devoted to printing, distribution and corporate functions."
That’s the Press, Baby: It’s Only Logistical
Saturday, 6 June 2009, 06:30
David Sullivan: "[Newspapers] are essentially a logistics business that happens to employ journalists. That's why newspapers didn't invent Google. That's why journalists, most of whom have little idea what an inserter is, always seem ahead of the business side folks on new technology."
Albert Sun: Price Discriminate! The economics of charging for online content
Tuesday, 2 June 2009, 07:52
"What you really need to do to monetize content is to take a page from the airlines and freemium web services and every other company with a product ever and learn how to price discriminate. Not only will you make much more money doing it, you will produce much better quality journalism as well."
Thursday, 19 July 2007, 19:00
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"Every month, about 5 million National Geographics are printed. And many people seem to hoard them. For years, for decades. Why?"
