X
    Categories: NewspaperShift

What content would you pay for (if any) on a newspaper site?

Newspapers online have always struggled with a consistent business model. There have been registration walls, paid content behind walls (including columnists and archives), and various ad schemes from paid search ads to classifieds to interstitial ads that bar entry. Many of the paid content ideas have fallen aside lately, with the boom in online advertising. NYTimes.com dropped its not-so-popular TimesSelect pay wall for its op-ed columnists, and Rupert Murdoch is leaning toward tearing down the Wall Street Journal Online’s paid wall as well. So the question remains: If online newspapers decide to rev up advertising, what happens if there’s a cyclical downturn in ads? What revenues do they rely on? What content would you pay for on a newspaper site? Older archives? Specialized news alerts? Customized feeds? Nothing? Share your thoughts in the comments below and I’ll publish the best ones in a future Your Take Roundup.

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

View Comments (41)

  • Many of you recall that former conservative Eugene Mayor Jim Torrey ran for the Oregon State Senate in 2006 against Senator Vicki Walker. He lost, but it was one of the most expensive races in legislative history because his friends have very deep pockets and he has an incredible ability to appear moderate because he doesn’t let facts get in the way.

  • the cost of them publishing online, and the bandwidth needed is more than covered with ads, and for very important local information I need to know I can always spend 50 cents now and then on the actual paper-printed version.

Comments are closed.