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Executive Summary: ‘The vast majority only have one online subscription’ (digitalnewsreport.org)
1 point by hhs on June 12, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment



Everything new is old. It would be more funny if it wasn't so frustrating.

News organisations are increasingly looking to subscription and membership or other forms of reader contribution to pay the bills in a so-called ‘pivot to paid’.

Right, so just the way newspapers were forever. There was a brief few years where all the online newspapers had a good old fashioned Mexican standoff about who would put their content behind a paywall first. Now they they've all taken the plunge, we are back to the 1950s.

Platforms are rethinking their responsibilities in the face of events (Christchurch attacks, Molly Russell suicide) and regulatory threats, with Facebook rebalancing its business towards messaging apps and groups – the so-called ‘pivot to private’.

Right, a communication medium where people send messages to each other one-on-one or to select groups.

Meanwhile audiences continue to embrace on-demand formats with new excitement around podcasts (New York Times, Guardian) and voice technologies – the so-called ‘pivot to audio’.

Audio? Imagine that. My grandparents next to their big honkin' living room radio would laugh their heads off.




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