3 ms·
>Good journalism isn't free, and nobody is willing to pay. NYT costs costs $4/mo for the first year, then jacks up to a staggering (by subscription standards f
by erickhill 3y ago
>Good journalism isn't free, and nobody is willing to pay.
NYT costs costs $4/mo for the first year, then jacks up to a staggering (by subscription standards for 'digital media') $25/mo. They have almost 10M subscribers.
Wallstreet Journal costs $6/mo for the first year then it goes to $12.50. They and have ~4M subscribers.
For both publications the subscriber counts are mostly online-only while print numbers continue to fall.
My point is there seems to be a healthy market for quality national reporting that use pay-walls especially when the organizations have the revenue to afford international bureaus (NPR being an exception that doesn't have a pay-wall). People will pay for a product they feel hits a certain quality/trust threshold.
However, most major US cities have only 1 single newspaper remaining and those print versions get thinner and thinner due to lack of ads. Where I live, the newsrooms have indeed been gutted and/or eliminated entirely. This has been going on since around 2005 or so. Back then, the first wave was due to the dominance of Craigslist and the evaporation of the Classifieds section, which generated a lot of revenue for papers.
A significant percentage of the stories in the Seattle Times (my local paper) have stories reprinted from NY Times, Washington Post and others. Cheaper for them to pay licensing fees than hire professional journalists to write articles.