Wednesday, September 2, 2009

An online newspaper paid subscription that worked

A loyal FFE reader sent along this link to a Newsweek article about a newspaper that made the online model pay.

This can't be possible, all those Internet news gurus said this wouldn't work.

3 comments:

Brown said...

It is a hopeful sign but I would like to see it work in a larger market with a bigger player.

I continue to laugh at the "news yearns to be free" crowd. Tomoatoes don't yearn to be free at the farmer's market. Gasoline doesn't yearn to be free at Costco. Likewise, news has value and if advertisers aren't going to subsidize it, then consumers will either need to do it or drown in their own ignorance.

However, now that publishers have desperately slashed and burned their way to solvency, it will remain to be seen how much of the remaining content is worth paying for. The Advance papers in Michigan come to mind; yesterday's Flint Journal confused Flushing and Flushing Township. No one is going to pay for amateur-hour journalism.

Dave Forsmark said...

Journal lead headline tonight:
"Board member potential conflict of interest issue back to the table"
HUH?

Anonymous said...

There were a few comments about the above headline below the story in yesterady's Mlive. Now, instead of editing the headline, it appears the story has just disappeared from The Journal...