General Business Updates and News

[ookpik]

Andrew Coyne: All the news that’s fit to pay for 

Of course, the reader, as such, has never been willing to pay the full cost of news, or at any rate has never been asked. The industry... has relied on advertising, rather than circulation, for the bulk of its revenues.

But now advertisers have deserted us en masse. And so the industry now faces the challenge of persuading readers, not only to read us rather than the thousands of other alternatives that are now available online, but to pay something closer to the full shot for something they have been used to getting at a heavy discount, historically, or more recently for free...

We can talk all we want about the role of social media, or Google, but in the end it comes down to whether we offer a compelling enough product to attract willing customers. And if we are honest with ourselves we will concede that all too often we have not.

The classic newspaper model has substituted quantity for quality, in hopes that if we threw enough at the reader, some of it would stick long enough for them to peruse the ads.