
Pittsburgh paper launches online charging scheme - rms
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/02/pittsburgh-post-gazette-charging-scheme
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brianlash
"The Post-Gazette, known locally simply as the PG..."

My family owns a small convenience store in the Pittsburgh area. Over 10 years
of selling that paper I've heard Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Post, Post-
Gazette, and "the Post," but I can't point to a single time someone called it
the PG.

~~~
steveklabnik
They've been trying to brand it that way lately. I thought it was strange,
too.

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joe_the_user
The thing is that newspapers back-in-their-day, didn't make the bulk of their
money from selling their content but from advertising.

A small town (or even small-city) Newspaper, twenty years ago was: 1) An
assortment of major stories culled from the New York Times, AP and what other
newswire they subscribed to. 2) A couple custom national articles and/or
editorials. 3) Some local news pulled from the police blotter 4) Classified
adds plus banner ads declaring the usefulness of hypnosis for weight loss and
such.

The money came from ads. Aside from the small number of major newspapers in
the country, the product was completely derivative, completely ad-driven and
generally strongly tied with local political interests. I can't see the death
of this phenomena as a great loss. Moreover, I can't see websites with
newsfeeds as what killed it. Rather, Craigslist killed it with free classified
ads _and_ it killed itself by not improving anything, not reducing prices and
increasing volume, not innovating and so-forth. It's an industry which
previously consisted of a lot of local monopolies and the problem with any
monopoly is that it's profits are _so_ good that it will hold to it's position
till it dies rather than competing, since competition would result in a profit
drop of an order of magnitude - if you have an investment opportunity that
makes a solid 10% profit each year, you'd probably keep putting money into it,
even if the money that you could invest dropped each year. Why innovate to
make 3%?

Someone pointed-out the craigslist might make $100 million/year but has wiped-
out an industry that made multi-billions. Now the billions previously spent on
classifieds are available to buy entirely different kind of products but its
still more logical for newspapers to gnaw on the bones of their previous
business model.

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johnohara
I've always considered HN links to Paul Graham's essays to be PG+.

