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The funny thing is, charging for content does work, if the content is known to be good. My favourite examples (ie, ones I subscribe to) are The Economist and Cr

The funny thing is, charging for content does work, if the content is known to be good. My favourite examples (ie, ones I subscribe to) are The Economist and Crikey magazine, in Australia. Both are best-in-class news services that actually do real investigative reporting and deliver information that people widely consider worth paying for. They both focus on quality, not quantity. Or niche services - I subscribe to WestEast magazine just for its fantastic quarterly survey of fashion and design trends. I consider all the above a bargain, for what I get! Paying for generalist press-release AP-cut-and-pasting junk like the WSJ, though? Give me a break. I see no reason for most of the generalist news services to exist at all. I am not sure why we require all these different "brands" to republish the same damn AP story 20,000 times.

protomyth 17y ago
For a business example, look at the payments people / businesses are willing to pay for real-time market data. WSJ has enough non-generic reporting to be viable (look at their website subscriptions), but I would be unwilling to pay for content from CNN,MSNBC, Fox, or their ilk. They just don't put in the effort to dig deeper, properly investigate, do the fact checking, keep it non-partisan, and stay away from the trivial (1). I am with you on the niche services, I do and will pay for those. 1) The ballon boy's escapade did not in any way affect my like in a material way, but I would bet more facts were given during that little fiasco then reported during the whole of the health care debate.