
Charging (a lot) for news online: The Newport Daily News - webology
http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/charging-a-lot-for-news-online-the-newport-daily-news-new-experiment-with-paid-content/
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brandnewlow
Send 3 guys, a Django hacker, a reporter and a business guy to that town. Get
credentialed.

Hacker sets up a blog and a GiantBomb.com-style structured wiki of every
person, place, thing, story and issue in town. They now have the speed
advantage and own local search. He also cooks up a self-serve, stupid-simple
advertising system that works just like Facebook's original Flyer program. $15
bucks to run a flyer for the day. $50 for the week.

Reporter covers local meetings and businesses and recruits citizens to
contribute to a town hall blog. The goal is not so much to get pageviews off
the citizen blog, but to show the community that the cool people are all on
board.

Business guy meets every small business owner in town, organizes weekly reader
meetups, handles sponsorship sales.

In three months, they could position themselves as THE web site for the
community. Then it's a matter of selling monthly sponsorships at $300/month to
local businesses and professionals who want a seat at the town's front page.
You sell 40 of those and you're making $160,000/year. Add on another $20-30k
in flyer sales.

Meanwhile, the biz-dev guy cuts a deal with a few regional outlets to
syndicate their content to them and with a few local businesses to host
sponsored blogs for them.

And 1-2 times a year they throw a must-attend event and make a profit off
ticket sales.

There's probably a bit of a ceiling to an approach like this, but the right
three guys could more or less call the shots in their community once they get
up and running.

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anigbrowl
_Want home delivery of the print paper? That’s $145 a year. Want home delivery
and online access? That’s $245. And if you want just online access — to an
electronic edition that duplicates the appearance of the print product — it’s
a whopping $345._

So it costs me $100 more p/a to _not_ get the dead trees delivered to my door
6 times a week? I read the article three times to make sure I wasn't the one
smoking crack.

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DougBTX
Better ad rates on paper?

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anigbrowl
I assume so, but I really wonder how they expect to sell this to their
customers (apart from a few emigres with intense ties to their place of
origin). That their online subscriber visits have dropped by 66% even before
the paywall goes live isn't encouraging.

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siukwai
Interesting business model. It may work for very small newspapers because they
have a lock on the niche, but I don't see this model working for larger
newspapers. I'm pretty media company agnostic when it comes to news (except
for the economist).

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buugs
Well isn't this a great business model for someone without competition.

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natmaster
This sounds backwards to me. Newspapers are dying because news is
commoditized. Having an inferior product will NOT help these people compete
with the free guys.

