Today http://www.newsday.com went behind a paywall. Unlike WSJ, they’re not letting Google users through for free. »
Newspapers in Cleveland, DC, Phoenix, and Albany have just as many investigative reporters as before cuts http://tr.im/DmiG »
Memo confirms it: Politico’s owner launching DC local news site, run by @jimbradysp, with 50 staffers http://tr.im/DnG8 »
Quick video: @davewiner on what happens to media and the real-time web after Twitter http://tr.im/DmZc »
Details staffers say their website is “very 1999.” At GQ.com, an editor says, “We’re very 2002 right now” http://tr.im/Dli0 »
Oct. 28, 2009, 6:43 p.m. | FOLLOW @NIEMANLAB ON TWITTER
I am a Long Island resident. Here’s why I would not pay for Newsday online: any “original content” is like Channel 5 TV news at 10pm- rapes, murders, and (special emphasis) car accidents. It’s spiced up with celebrity and sports coverage, non of which are of interest, and much is available elsewhere. The geniuses who designed the site have made it slow and clunky, overloaded with videos that threaten to crash the computer.
I have noted increasingly that they remove the wall and let it be “free” on weekends and sometimes over night. I am not a media scholar (no snickers please) but I would suggest that they are testing exactly how dismal their traffic is when they have the pay wall up, versus offering freely available content.
A more sensible model would be to make it free and then work hard to get local businesses advertising (with the same dodgy techniques that their “circulation” department was known for, back in the day).