Newsday to charge for Web access

Alright. Set up a new website every day to steal a few news stories.

Be sure to find a way to build an audience large enough to make it worth your while, and be sure they find you every time you change web sites.

By the time you get big enough to be anything but an annoyance, you'll be a hell of a lot easier to track.

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It isn't true in music? Come on. The major avenues to stealing music get shut down constantly. Yeah someone's always a step ahead, there's always another way, but once that site gets too big, bam, they're gone too.

Just ask Apple and iTunes about the death of the music industry.

 

I guess we'll have to wait and see. They certainly aren't the only newspaper that's going to try this, and it's probably the best shot the industry has. We'll see how well it works.

 

God I hope it works.

Like I said, I wish it was 50 papers doing it starting tomorrow instead of one. I'm afraid one might be doomed to fail.

 

Yes, but note that the record companies who produce the music aren't the ones getting directly paid. Do media outlets need to find their own iTunes?

 

They don't really have any competition, so it's a good test for other papers in that category and not a good test for, say, the dailies in NYC proper, or Chicago or Boston or Minneapolis/SP, etc. But if Newsday succeeds, why not Houston, Portland, Atlanta, Baltimore, San Diego, in fact most papers?

 

It's a good idea, but Cablevision will piss all over itself in the execution, thereby pushng Newsday one step closer to Little Jimmy Dolan's goal of turning it into a shopper. (props to Michael Gee for predicting that first)

 

Copy and pasters at small blogs, even emailers, are a tiny drop in the bucket. A gnat. They are no more a danger than people sharing what they read in today's paper around the water cooler of old.

 

I'm not at all familiar with Newsday's market, so I'll trust you about that.

The reason I say 50 is to block out the papers that provide the nation's big news. Thinking now, maybe that's not the best plan because that news will always show up on CNN.com or some such national news service that's large and well established enough to prosper on the internet without charging for content.

But, it's not as if CNN.com staffs any of those national stories, especially anything that's breaking news. Ditto on ESPN.com. They run every game story but staff a tiny fraction of them.

Maybe you could dissolve the AP, or at least keep it from working with CNN or ESPN or any sites like that, then people would have to turn to newspaper sites for everything. Sure you could get the game score elsewhere, but want real content? You'll have to pay for it from some outlet that actually staffed the game, be that a newspaper, a blog or something else.

Maybe I'm dreaming a little much, but you'd have to find a way to force the hand of the readers. Maybe a lot of them would settle for less, settle for what they can pick up on ESPN.com. So you have to shut that off, too, except for what ESPN's writers create themselves.

It just seems to me the game has changed. Changed in every way. The print product costs readers money, but never enough to make much of a difference. It's never been about the price of a subscription on our end. It's been about the advertising. We can't make enough with internet advertising, so we have to change what our primary revenue stream is.

 

People on Long Island who are interested in only NYC pro sports certainly have other options, but they always did. But for the whole package -- pro sports, local sports, local news, local features, national features -- there is no other option. And even though they've cut the hell out of the staff, I'm pretty sure it's the second-largest news staff in the NYC area, not counting the WSJ, and a quality read.

 

Sports is probably the least-read section of the newspaper. No newspaper in its right mind is going to back off this decision because people can get their pro sports news elsewhere. That's waaaaaaay far down the list. Might be a little different at college town papers where that's the franchise, but if you can sell advertising to support it being free, no one's saying you can't mix and match.

 

What happens when one benevolent person decides to share his password and user name with a friend, who shares it with another friend, who shares it with ...

 

Not enough to make a dent.

Whatever happened to usernames and passwords anyway? I can't remember the last time I had to visit www.bugmenot.com.