Saul Friedman, an 80-year old print veteran at Newsday, hops over the paywall (via BoingBoing):
Customers of Cablevision, the cable and Internet provider that owns Newsday, and people who subscribe to Newsday in print will still be able to browse Newsday.com unfettered. But Newsday recently announced that everyone else will have to pay $5 a week to see much of the site, making it one of the few newspapers in the country to take such a plunge.
Lot’s of people linking to this newspaper suicide pact article. Of course, it will fail miserably and will actually result in more of what they are trying to avoid:
Newspapers that are turning to paywall plans today are gambling on a risky revenue stream that even the experts aren’t predicting will provide a replacement to their lost advertising revenues (their biggest financial problem is the rapid decline in advertising rates, not the slow decline in print circulation). It’s a “well, we’ve got to do SOMETHING” solution, not a logical, do-the-math solution. And since since most media companies are owned by shareholders, the resulting loss of confidence could be catastrophic.
I’m relatively certain that the collaboration and collusion of newspaper CEOs to form a cartel-like relationship and simoultaneously begin charging for content is going to do the opposite of what they intend, as well as draw scrutiny from their competitors and the Justice Department. The Associated Press has also announced plans to become the internets’ ‘content cops’ . There are many others news sources besides newspapers, who will be rewarded with link-love, such as the wire services, local TV and radio, and neighborhood level papers. I suspect those online properties may go ’subprime’ with regards to traffic once they drop out of the search engine indexes and people stop linking to them (h/t Atrios).
