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 [...]
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.