WP: News Groups Wrestle With Online Fees

[DeepModem Mom]

News Groups Wrestle With Online Fees
By Leslie Walker
Thursday, May 26, 2005; Page E01
CARLSBAD, Calif.


To charge or not to charge, that is the question still bedeviling the news industry nearly a decade after it decided to give away news on the Web for free.

The debate got fresh fodder last week when the New York Times announced that come September, it will charge $50 a year for Web access to its op-ed columnists and news archives. A week earlier, the Los Angeles Times moved in the reverse direction, removing the $60 annual fee it had been charging for its online entertainment guide to Los Angeles.

The free-vs.-pay debate is assuming heightened urgency -- and generating a fair amount of flip-flopping these days -- because Internet readership and advertising are booming at a time when newspaper circulation is declining at accelerated rates. Newspapers are struggling to figure out how to make money from their growing Internet audience without cannibalizing their print editions.

The Los Angeles Times declined to say how many Web subscriptions it had sold, but apparently it wasn't enough to offset the advertising it sacrificed when it started charging for CalendarLive, a Web entertainment guide, in August 2003. By making the information free again, the paper said it expects to attract many more Web readers. "A subscription offering on the Web is a barrier to the fastest and widest growth in our markets," declared Robertson Barrett, general manager of the Los Angeles Times Interactive....

***

The painful transition facing the newspaper industry was on display here this week at the Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference. In a panel discussion, top executives from three newspaper companies -- Knight-Ridder Inc., The Washington Post Co. and Dow Jones & Co. -- expressed optimism about what they called the "challenges" facing their industry. Since most large papers have gained more Web readers than they have lost in print, the panelists said the industry has a chance to reinvent itself....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/25/AR2005052501758.html

[bemildred]

1. They will never be able to compete with DU. nt

[AndyTiedye]

2. The "News Industry"'s Problem is that They Have Stopped Reporting the News

We are not willing to pay to read the latest Rovian talking points,
be they in a treeware paper, or on-line.

We will pay for the real deal, willingly, as the number of 's
appearing on this page will attest.

[TomClash]

3. What????

What's the matter with you?? Are you intelligent or somethin'?