Thursday, May 31, 2007

Why Pay For The Cow?

Thursday, May 31, 2007

There's been plenty of debate of late about the wisdom of newspapers giving too much of their product away for free. A forceful May 7 Wall Street Journal commentary by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter E. Hussman Jr. sparked the latest round of soul-searching. Hussman's call for newspapers to reconsider the costs and consequences of free news comes at a time when online ad sales growth is slowing and news aggregators like Yahoo and Google continue to capitalize on content created by the mainstream media. (Read Hussman's full editorial here)

Certainly, many newspapers are satisfied with the progress of their websites and remain committed to a strategy of offering frequently updated news at no cost to readers . But that strategy likely will be tweaked if print advertising revenues continue to nosedive and online sales fail to reach projections.

Whatever the trend, it's time for universal agreement on how and why budget-driven reductions in newsrooms produce a rippling negative impact on all things connected to journalism.

Your thoughts?

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1 Responses to “Why Pay For The Cow?”

Mark M. Sweetwood said...
8:21 PM, June 04, 2007

Welcome, fellow Blogspotters!

Walter's column was great reading and he made many compelling points. This is a complicated issue and here are my complicated views:

http://marksweetwood.blogspot.com/2007/05/survive-or-thrive-newspaper-industry.html

For more good reading, I would suggest Alan Jacobson's thoughts:

http://brasstacksdesign.com/unique_visitors.htm

Best of luck with this new blog venture!

Mark


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