Every night, our presses churn through three or four tons of newsprint and our carriers drive almost 4,000 miles up and down central New Hampshire roads to get the news out to our readers. And we’re a relatively small paper (about 18K), albeit in a fairly rural area. Wouldn’t it be great to replace all [...]
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 [...]
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.