Why You Should Pay to Read This - New York Times

I couldn't make a better case for why newspapers are an outdated business than this. One day soon, and it will definitely happen at some point, a major newspaper is going to go all online with no dead tree version. A newspaper is in the business of delivering information, not pulp.

Carr is misleading to suggest that being online does not have costs associated with it, even if those costs are not in the form of "beefy union delivery drivers". Because the switching costs of a no-fee service are that much lower, the amount that online businesses have to spend for customer acquisition goes up disproportionately. Craigslist is a notable exception to the rule but they were first and like ebay are somewhat a phenomenon at this point. Try being a competitor to ebay or Craigslist.

If Carr's thesis is that being free means getting what you paid for, then his arguments actually ended up in favor of being free. This piece really just reflects the mood in the newspaper business that nobody in the business is particularly excited about the future, and as a result there are two camps, those that are looking for new opportunities outside of newspaper and those that are being defensive about the "importance" of newspapers.

Link: Why You Should Pay to Read This - New York Times.

Free on the Web is one thing -Flickr for pictures, Slate for news analysis, Craigslist for classifieds - but taking free into the offline world of paper, delivery and vendors means scale, the grail of the race for eyeballs, and that adds to expense. If a Web site achieves a growing audience, it simply beefs up servers and serves up more ads. If a free print product catches on, its publisher has to deal with beefy union delivery drivers and serving up more expensively milled dead trees.

Comments

[Florian Dargel]

http://www.netzeitung.de/ is online only (in German). I think they were sold some time ago, and haven't taken over the German media landscape at all.