

Newspapers: Shut up and charge already  - ams1
http://www.kingkaufman.com/2009/06/06/charge/

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doug_m
"hey’ll quickly understand the value of their content, which, with rare
exceptions like the Wall Street Journal, is something very much like zero"

This is very much untrue, at least in the UK. The quality dailies have had a
very strong year and have driven forward the debate on all kinds of things:-
parliamentary expenses, the Brown/McBridge spin sleaze, the Iraq inquiry, the
News of the World tapping scandal.

Whether we'd have seen anything like this kind of investigation from the BBC's
news organisation or online is no sure thing. Possibly in a TV show like
Panorama but then you're talking about 50 such shows a year.

Sometimes I feel like a minority of one but when the papers start charging I
imagine I'll think its a good use of my income and I'll pick one.

~~~
ricree
Agreed. I can't really speak for any other area, but several of the large
Chicago papers (most notably the Tribune) have been key in exposing and
fighting government corruption.

While their average content isn't always that great, they are able to supply a
level of investigation and fact checking that would be missed if they went out
of business.

~~~
hvs
There's no question that newspapers often (sometimes?) do good reporting --
the Chicago Tribune is a great example of this. The real question is, are
people willing to pay money for it and is it enough to maintain a business? I
(and many others) would argue that the current structure of newspapers is not
going to be profitable. When 90% of your content is filler from the AP or
Reuters, why should people pay for it? The day of general purpose news
organizations (with the exception of a few like AP and Reuters) is fast coming
to an end.

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redcap
Pretty much to the point - just do it.

Although Rupert Murdoch's already decided to do this for his arsenal of
papers. In Australia it will work for the financial paper The Australian
Financial Review, but we'll have to wait and see how it will work out for the
rest of the 'normal' papers, including the only national paper in Australia,
The Australian.

As for me, I'm going to continue to get my news primarily from the
A(ustralian)BC and the BBC, both provided by taxpayer money and providing a
public service with little of the advertising baggage that commercial
providers come with.

~~~
hvs
I don't know if I'd trust a government-run organization to do any deep
investigation of its masters, though.

