Fannin on the dotcom pillage

FW:

Carroll was in Baltimore, but he was on the way to Harvard. Tribune recruited him away from Harvard and to LA.

Anyway, although he and Baquet did cut the local coverage and regional bureaus, it's hard to imagine they would have done so had Tribune increased their budget instead of cutting it.

 

The web is full of perverse logic.
One recent article complained that AP filed suit to keep a news aggregator from reposting AP headlines and snippets in an online newsletter that subscribers paid for.
AP's contention was that it went beyond fair use and if the company wanted to do that then they could pay the rights fees like everyone else.
Oh the outrage. "The news is free." How dare AP expect to be paid for the work they did.
That's the thing about the web, the conventional wisdom is that general interest newspapers can't charge for the online edition.
Only specialty reporting, like business coverage, or sites aimed at sports nerds that focus on things like recruiting.
Now the push is to make everything online free, since the theory goes that if you increase the traffic, you increase the ad revenue, but as the WSJ noted, if they opened up its site, they would lose tens of millions since people are still paying, and they are more desireable online readers, since they actually stay on the site and look at other things and not click on one article and go.
Of course if sites went pay, or at least partial pay, the outrage would be loud, but the genie is already out of the bottle. You cant go back now.
Some papers and places won't be hit. For a variety of reasons, some metros are mostly immune from the ebb and flow.
What will happen in other places, eventually, is a premium print edition, that will be targeted to the affluent. The paper will also have a free daily tab to hit other people and two sites, one a premium online one that will be part of your print subscription and will also be available at a cost to non-subcribers, it will have sorts of video features and all the other bells and whistles and a free, bare bones site that will hit the headlines.

 

I can agree. Fair points. I just have problems with the two of them entering martyrdom. The courage resided with John Puerner and Jeff Johnson.

 

As a viewer/reader/customer, I will gladly pay for online products or services that are important to me. This site is a prime example: $60 to peruse SJ without ads? I didn't give it a second thought. Webby gets what he needs, but I'm getting a tangible benefit for my money. ... But I'm not very inclined to spend money on pure information -- because information can be had in a lot of places. Paying for a premium news site doesn't interest me, because what am I getting out of it? The news? No, I can get that anywhere. But you know what I'll pay for --the news on my phone, with a customizable RSS feed, because that's more convenient to me. Or podcasts that I can download from iTunes. Or Amazon.com coupons because the Sunday inserts ain't what they used to be. I can get the news anywhere for free -- why would I pay for it? Give me something I want, and I'm hooked.