Thursday, August 6, 2009
Pay for news?
posted at 9:27 AM | Permalink |
According to this article, at some time in the not-too-distant-future, we will have to pay a fee to get news on the internet. You'd think - considering plummeting hard-copy newspaper sales and all - that the people planning this (if indeed they are planning it and this isn't just them throwing the idea out to see if it floats) would realize its folly. For one thing, there will (continue to) be ways around subscription articles (a solution for some subscriber-only articles at present, for example, is copying a headline then plopping it into a search engine and opening the free result). Also, although television news is far less detailed than print or internet, and the anchors usually shout a lot or flirt with the camera/viewer, and the content emphasizes way celebrity/ gossip/ entertainment, tv news is available eighty gazillion hours a day. Also, too, there are bound to be services providing news for free so that will mean that any that charge fees will have fewer subscribers than they expect and/or count on. As with hiking commuter and other fees, there is always a balance to consider between increased revenue from increasing or adding fees and decreased revenue from refusal to buy a product at that or perhaps any fee. And is it a good idea to add one more claim on people's money at a time when there's not quite enough to go around for most of us? My prediction - hope - is that they will realize this is a bad idea and not do it.

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