It seems that some folks just never learn. With most newspapers seeing their circulations (and corresponding ad revenue) dwindle steadily from month to month, you would think the last thing they would consider as an option to make up the difference is forcing readers to pay for the content they place online. After all, the plethora of content that is already freely available on the web is what prompted readers to stop buying hard-copy newspapers in the first place. But charging for online content is exactly what they have in mind, and they plan to start sooner rather than later, some even before the end of this year.
I predict that this new endeavor will meet a pretty poor fate, primarily because the traditional news organizations are quickly losing their influence and relevancy to online-only news operations and bloggers. Many of the largest news stories aren’t even broken by reporters at all these days, a fact that has become all too apparent with the mainstream media’s propensity to simply ignore news that doesn’t promote their liberal agendas.
A prime example is the fall of Acorn, one of the biggest stories to emerge in recent memory. The New York Times and virtually every other left-leaning “news” outlet completely ignored it until the House of Representatives voted to cut off public funding for the organization. Who broke that story and ran with it? A couple of 20-something amateur journalists with a hidden camera whose shocking videos were subsequently published by a plethora of conservative bloggers and Fox News Channel (the only TV-based news outlet that has a clue about retaining viewers).
I believe that trying to charge for their online news stories is the wrong way to go if the newspapers want to stay in business at all. What they should be doing is working on increasing the ranks of their online readers to the point where they can eventually replace their dwindling print ad revenue with new revenue from online ads. And the best way to do that is to start investigating and reporting the REAL news, not picking and choosing only the stories that will help promote their political points of view. That’s step one, and until they wise up and take it they’ll continue to bleed revenue until there is nothing left of their media empires.