Boston Globe Launches Pay Site

That still seems like a pretty small cost relative to the benefits of getting to look at the the best site for world news, the best site for your sports teams, the best site for Curb Your Enthusiasm coverage, etc.

Further, even if we accept the proposition that aggregating adds value-which it does-it doesn't explain why newspapers continue to package that information in bundles based on a readership area limited by the infrastructure built decades ago (i.e. along delivery routes). Especially as people become more transient, they're interests become more diverse. They're concerned much more about particular subjects than particular geographic reasons.

 

My guess is that 20-somethings won't be getting the actual paper, but will be reading on their Nook/Kindle, etc. Still, you make a valid point, there is a bunch in this coming generation that 1) don't care about getting the news and/or 2) don't care if they are reading from a reliable source.

 

Could just be the circles I travel in but the young people I know care far more about the news and quality sources of information than most older folks I know. In part, because, as I've mentioned, the Internet makes it so much easier to access sources of information that would have been much more difficult to get in the past.

 

Older people don't care about the truth, either. They just didn't have the choice of where to get their news.

 

I concur. Many of the older people with no grasp of journalism that I know go online and believe the first thing they read. Non-journalism friends in their 40s and 50s, for instance, are far more likely to post Bleacher Report or Examiner.com stories on Facebook than my friends in their 20s and 30s.

The younger generation had the Web's unreliability drilled into its head early, in school and college.

 

Giving away the sports for free feels more like a necessity. Because the Globe no longer has just the Herald to worry about. You start charging for sports, readers can get the same (and in some cases better) content for free from the Herald, ESPN Boston, NESN, WEEI, CSNNE, etc. Can't say the same about the other sections -- if you're looking for a good place to eat, where you gonna go, the Improper Bostonian or one of those other godawful free rags?

I agree the Globe's content is down, and in some instances obsolete. But in terms of hockey coverage, Kevin Paul Dupont and Fluto Shinzawa are still must-reads for me.