The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
In early July, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation placed its two London-based “quality” dailies, the Times and Sunday Times, behind a paywall, charging £1 for 24 hours access, or £2 a week (after an introductory £1 for the first month.*) At the same time, News Corp also forbad the UK’s Audit Bureau of Circulations from reporting site traffic*, so that no meaningful measure of the paywall’s effect was available. That situation has now been partially reversed, with News reporting some of its own numbers: they claim 105,000 total transactions for digital content between July and October.* (Several people have wrongly reported this as 105,000 users.
The number of users is smaller, as there can be more than one transaction per user.) LG to Produce Flexible Electronic Newspapers This Year. In January, Inhabitat reported that LG was planning a flexible electronic newspaper that would cut down on the tremendous amounts of paper used to produce daily newspapers. Today, it was announced that the e-newspaper, which has a 19-inch flexible display, is expected to be put into production by the end of this year.
The ‘bendy e-reader’ will look and feel just like a newspaper page, but will be able to update itself with the latest news and even issues of your favorite magazines. LG’s new flexible e-ink display can be rolled up and put in your pocket or satchel, and it is hoped that the e-reader will reduce the vast amounts of paper and water used daily to produce newspapers. LG’s new technology allows the e-reader to be bent and then return to its original shape. How to Save the News. Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long.
But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to.
The Next News Media Metaphor – The Sports Team. Many things going on that I want to talk about… Excited about working on Mozilla Drumbeat, a project the Mozilla Foundation that is getting ready to launch.
New York Times to spend 2010 erecting a partial paywall. The New York Times Announces Plans for a Metered Model for NYTimes.com in 2011. New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers. Sulzberger Jr.
New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. What the heck are publishers thinking? A positively effervescent survey of more than 500 newspaper publishers yesterday predicted that advertising sales would drop only 0.2% in 2010 after plunging 28.4% in the first nine months of this year.
The man who conducted the survey doesn’t believe the publisher forecast. I don’t believe it. And neither should you. Future of newspapers. Newspapers: a global industry in transition The decline of newspapers has been widely debated as the industry has faced down soaring newsprint prices, slumping ad sales, the loss of much classified advertising and precipitous drops in circulation.
In recent years the number of newspapers slated for closure, bankruptcy or severe cutbacks has risen—especially in the United States, where the industry has shed a fifth of its journalists since 2001.[1] Revenue has plunged while competition from internet media has squeezed older print publishers.[1][2] This has strictly affected only the United States or the English-speaking markets though there is a large rise in sales for countries like China, Japan and India.
Causes for decline[edit] France: Bailout for newspapers? Sarkozy gives free youth subscriptions. / The Christian Science Monitor. • A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
Skip to next paragraph Recent posts Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition This may be the era of Twitter and blogs, but the French government won’t give up on the printed press. Google CEO Eric Schmidt On Newspapers & Journalism. Is Google a newspaper killer?
Not by a long shot, says Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Nor does he want it to be. In a long interview about his company’s relationship with newspapers and the print journalism industry, Schmidt made it clear he wants established players to survive. In fact, he thinks Google has a “moral responsibility” to help. But help doesn’t mean a handout. I spoke with Schmidt on the topic about two weeks ago in his office at Google.