6 ms·
Currently working at a major publishing house, I wish more people shared your sentiment. The news may not be perfectly unbiased, but at least it's fact-checked
by zapt02 10y ago
Currently working at a major publishing house, I wish more people shared your sentiment. The news may not be perfectly unbiased, but at least it's fact-checked and not malicious.
From what I gather nobody has any idea how traditional publishing houses are going to dig themselves out of this. Native ads, a quality-over-quantity ad experience for advertisers and premium services (paywalls) are the holy trinity that everyone hopes will save the industry.
- mozumder 10y agoPretty sure what's going to happen is we're going to pay for news, at $100/year or so, like we pay for Netflix. You can probably get 100,000 people in a small city to buy that (given proper branding/marketing), and that's enough to hire a local newsroom of about 100 people.
- zapt02 10y agoI don't think you are right, because nobody has succeeded at the scope you have suggested - never mind local papers, even prestigious publications like TIME are having a very tough time, which I doubt is a "branding/marketing" issue. You are vastly overestimating the "will to pay" for journalism. It's much more likely that local news desks will disappear in favor for a central and smaller product.
- mozumder 10y agoBezos is pushing that model at a larger scale in the Washington Post. We'll have to see how well that works.
- magic_beans 10y agoI pay for Washington Post and NYT. Honestly, I couldn't live without them. Not for your typical daily news, but for the truly interesting stories. It's good stuff. I could spend hours.
- LordFrith 10y agoBefore the rise of the Internet, traditional media like magazines and newspapers got the majority of their revenue from advertising. It's nice when people pay money to subscribe but it wasn't enough then. It's probably not enough now.
- mozumder 10y agoBefore the internet, we still had to pay for newspaper subscriptions, and their revenues were supplemented by advertising. The advertising will continue. The subscriptions are only meant to define the audience demographics. Lots of print media companies actually limit their audiences to only marketable demographics, especially magazines. Magazines often say they're oversubscribed if they don't hit certain demographic profiles, so their advertisers aren't being wasted. For example, if a bunch of poor college males were subscribing to Vogue, it doesn't help their advertisers. And those subscriptions costs a ton of money in mailings, so they tighten their audience to be core advertiser friendly.
- cafard 10y agoCurrently, an NY Times full digital subscription is $300/year; full + home (or just home, as far as I know) is nearer $500. Washington Post daily + digital is $90.