Remember Ken Doctor’s three-part series for us in February on lessons U.S. news companies could learn from the digital strategies of their European peers? Hannah Vinter at WAN-IFRA did a followup interview with Ken about his research for the series. I think this is smart:

We’re already seeing that more than a tenth of US dailies are charging in one way or another for digital access. When I look at that strategically, it’s not a huge winning strategy in itself. What it does essentially is give you 5-10% extra circulation revenue, if you do it really well. And 5-10% plus circulation revenue is nice, it’s better than negative circulation revenue, but it’s not a huge amount of money. So it’s helping them a little in the short term, and that’s good, but the problem is that it’s mainly tapping their current readers, and current newspaper readers on both sides of the Atlantic are about 60 years old. Too many newspapers are trying to get more money out of the same audience, which is fine, but they’re not putting enough effort into getting new audience that they can monetize either through circulation or advertising.