Jackson Jambalaya

L. Gordon Crovitz writes in the Wall Street Journal what he thinks newspapers should do in order to survive in these changing times. He advocates newspapers charging a subscription, something I have always thought they should do as it made no sense to me why they gave away their product. He opines:

"With newspapers in cities across the country on the brink, an old idea is being resurrected in the hope of saving them: They should charge for access to their journalism on the Internet. This is a great idea, but about 10 years late.
Time magazine published a cover story earlier this month headlined "How to Save Your Newspaper." In it, former Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson noted how odd it is to charge for subscriptions in print but not online. "Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge me for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it. This is not a business model that makes sense.".....
For a decade beginning in the late 1990s, I was the Dow Jones executive chiefly charged with defending the paid-subscription business model of The Wall Street Journal's Web site. The skunk at every Internet-bubble-era garden party, the Journal team was often told we "just didn't get it," that information wants to be free and the paid model was idiotic.......
Conversely, when advertising fell in the early 2000s and then again more recently, having highly profitable online subscription revenues seemed like genius.
The truth is simpler: People are happy to pay for news and information however it's delivered, but only if it has real, differentiated value....
By 2007, the Journal's Web site had reached one million paying subscribers who value full access and convenient navigation to its unique business news. Another 20 million people each month read Journal articles made available free. Likewise, the Financial Times and ESPN generate significant online revenues from subscribers, along with free content. So do consumer services such as Consumer Reports and Zagat. Steve Jobs proved we'll pay up to $1 for digital songs on iTunes, and Amazon's Kindle established $10 as reasonable for a digital book. Beyond the Web, consumers pay monthly cable or satellite charges in the thousands of dollars per year.
Yet few city newspapers try to generate revenues directly from readers online, a huge problem now that advertising is so weak in print and online. Something needs to change if these newspapers and their large news staffs are to survive. The market capitalization of the New York Times Co. last week fell to the $500 million range -- what the MarketWatch Web site cost Dow Jones to acquire just a few years ago. Thus the renewed focus on new business models.
For years, publishers and editors have asked the wrong question: Will people pay to access my newspaper content on the Web? The right question is: What kind of journalism can my staff produce that is different and valuable enough that people will pay for it online?......."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123534987719744781.html

The rest of the column is pretty interesting and makes some salient points. Newspapers have fallen into the trap poor salesmen find themselves in all too often: If you don't ask the client to pay and close the sale, you'll never get the sale. Newspapers need to quit giving their product away if they want to survive. Cutting back to three issues a week or the number of stories won't earn more revenue as they are just slow walks down a dead end street. Unfortunately, too many newspapers have bought into the idea that because people expect online newspapers to be free, they should not charge online fees. Yet they wonder why they are going broke.