The folks at Journalism Online certainly got the timing right, and their model seems to offer the kind of options and flexibility publishers need. We’re intrigued, anyway. But will they gain enough traction? Can they take it from good idea to good business? Alan Mutter is doubtful, writing that “the wheels seemingly have come off [...]
Like so many others, we’re moving away from the practice of pumping our print content online for free. We’re now in the last stages of developing a Drupal-based CMS that (we hope) will help us to differentiate our online publishing activities from our print publications and also make it possible for us to begin charging [...]
Some people aspire to immortality through art or politics, or by building a business empire. I’d love to have my name attached to a law. Not a criminal law, mind you, but something like Moore’s Law — something that captures some fundamental insight clearly and simply. Here’s my current top candidate: Wilson’s Power Law of [...]
Once again, Steve Outing has offered some solids tips for implementing an effective pay wall (even if he’s not sold on the wisdom of the approach in the first place). In this critique of the NYT’s plans to eventually move to a metered pay wall, Outing suggests a number of smart tweaks, including setting a [...]
Here’s the basic story line on the so-called original sin of newspapers in the digital age: Foolish publishers started giving their content away for free online in some vain grab at traffic and potential online ad revenue, thus “training” people that news is free. Now they’re stuck in a world of their own creation, where [...]
Met today with Richard Anderson of Village Soup, who gave us an overview of the integrated print/online content management system they’ve developed to run their own sites and are now trying to spread to other news organizations. The CMS is interesting (there’s an open-source version and an enterprise version they’re selling), but what really impresses [...]
Jonathan Stray has posted a tool at the Nieman Labs site to model the financial impact on newspapers that put up pay walls. He uses NY Times data to critique their recently announced decision to start charging Web users for access.
We, too, are in the thundering herd of US newspapers moving toward charging for access. (More on our plans in a later blog.) So I played with the tool a bit to see what it might foretell for us and other papers.