I found a really interesting story today in the New York Times. It seems that media companies are trying to find some ways of getting people to pay for news online. The article said that The Boston Globe will launch next year a new paid website called the BostonGlobe.com in addition to their existing website Boston.com.
This new website, BostonGlobe.com, will require readers to pay for content such as photographs, full coverage stories, full editions of the daily and Sunday paper, among other things. However, subscribers to the newspaper will get full access to the website without having to pay any extra fees. According to the article, the company hopes to attract more and different types of advertising but expects not to have much advertising on BostonGlobe.com. They said that in the past they required readers to register in order to get content and it worked. With this new website, the company expects to provide more easy access to their audience.
Even the idea is good, I don’t know if their revenue model will last really long. When Internet came out everybody, including newspapers, started to post all online, without knowing the consequences that it was going to bring. Now, that one can go and find all kinds of information online for FREE is hard to set a new system where instead of getting it free you have to pay.
I consider it’s a good idea because newspapers are a business, and somehow needs to get money from somewhere to sustain the business. It needs to pay their employees, in this case reporters who get the news for us, the people. And if you think about it, if the newspaper doesn’t have the money to pay reporters, who is going to get the news for us? Will the news we get be paid by the “big guys”… or probably we’ll only get a little of news but not all.
Yeah, it is bad that now we have to pay for something it was free before, but I prefer to pay a price and be informed of what is going on in my community and my county THAN to be uninformed. After all everything has a price…
