Snapshots of papers that charge for content

PaidContent has an interesting piece that looks at how papers that began charging for online access are fairing. Most of the papers are small dailies and seem to be charging to protect their print edition.

Newspaper: Newport Daily News
City: Newport, R.I.
Circulation: 12,000
Pricing plan: Online-only subscriptions cost $5 a day, $10 a week, $35 a month, or $345 a year. Print and online combo subscriptions cost $11 a month or $100 a year. Obituaries, classifieds, blogs, and a copy of the front page are available for free online.
When pay wall was introduced: June 2009
Results: Publisher Buck Sherman told us that the goal was to “drive people back to the printed paper” and not to bring in online revenue. He says that so far “we have done well,” adding that single-copy sales are up 8 percent. Website traffic is down by about 30 percent since the paper began to charge, according to Compete figures.
Comment: The Daily News model grabbed headlines earlier this year because the paper was charging substantially more for the electronic edition of the paper than the print one. Competition is limited, with the much bigger Providence Journal pulling back on statewide coverage.

The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)

WaPo reporter Ian Shapira wrote an opinion piece about how Gawker borrowed heavily from his article about a business coach who teaches business leaders how to deal with Millennials in the workplace (she's running a racket, in my opinion, but that's another issue). He said he felt triumphant at first and then his editor told him they ripped off his story. He spent a considerable amount of time and effort reporting the story and a Gawker writer spent an hour or so cutting-and-pasting and re-wording it — generating more than 9,500 page views for Gawker.

I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.

Here's Shapira's original story and here's Gawker's post about it. Anyways, something to chew on.

AP Sets Up News Registry To Track And Protect Content Online

PaidContent.org has an item about AP's plan to track its content online.

Following up on its spring promise of an industry initiative to protect news content online, the Associated Press board today approved an ambitious plan to tag and track every piece of text content for the co-op and its members—and eventually photos and video. The news registry will start by tracking AP content and is expected to add AP member content in early 2010. AP will fund it through 2010; it’s then expected to be self sustaining. One feature of the registry, which is being designed to work on payment models ranging from free to pay walls, is a “beacon” that will let the AP know how the content is being used.

Public Radio is Killing Public Radio

Rafat Ali writes on paidcontent.org that the new IPhone app, which aggregates most public radio stations across the U.S., will hasten the demise of local public radio stations. I'm not sure I buy his argument, but its an interesting view of how technology that's supposed to widen an audience can also end up hurting the program provider.

PS: the view from NPR is that a number of local public radio stations are making money from successful fund-raisers. There are only a few that are on the ropes....

Close J-schools?

Richard Sine writes on Huffington Post:

"Do not fill up two years of anyone's time with bush-league "news services" (Oh boy! A clip in The Daily Supplement!) or mandatory classes in media history, communications theory or journalism philosophy. Do not charge so much money to walk through the door that the program is open only to the rich, the idle, or the financially illiterate. That's not a journalism school; that's a gold-plated welfare program for your old newsroom buddies, built on the backs of starry-eyed naïfs."

whoa -


thoughts?

Michael Jackson traffic melts entire Internet

Valleywag had an interesting post about Internet traffic spiking because of news about Michael Jackson's death. Some of the figures include:

• CNN's traffic grew fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
• Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama's election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook status updates tripled.
  
• AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
  
• TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson's death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
  
• The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
• For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren't working on Google News.
  
• Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson's page.

Amazing.

Media columnist rails against HuffPo

Advertising Age's media columnist, Simon Dumenco, takes a shot at the Huffington Post by saying it de-values content and drums up page views by featuring risqué pics of celebs.

What it comes down to is this: What is the Huffington Post, really? It likes to pretend that it's a respectable voice in the mediasphere, but it shamelessly pumps up its traffic by being just as trashy as, say, Maxim. It also likes to masquerade as a forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting journalistic institution, but it pays only a handful of actual journalists, and its idea of "journalism" is often downright parasitic of the work of real journalistic institutions.

Any thoughts?