Steve Brill's plans for the Globe

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7 Comments

• akwhitacre said:

  What Brill's plan wouldn't address, however, is that we now have a generation of people who grew up getting the Times and the Globe for free. Cynically speaking, it wouldn't be too hard for someone to write a program that quietly scrapes content from behind a pay-wall and reposts it for free elsewhere. Practically speaking though, subscription-based news sites have failed in the past (including the early version of nytimes.com), have only succeeded with very specialized kinds of news (finance, say), and would be a nightmare for getting breaking news to people who'd need to see it.

  Other papers have tried a combination of free for breaking news and subscription for longer pieces, but the most likely future is one with a much smaller full-time professional press funded in large part by foundations--leaving newspapers and their sites more independent than they are now with more time to do long-form investigative pieces but making it harder to devote personnel to traditional beats.

  February 9, 2009 12:55 PM

• Paul said:

  Rupert gets twice that from me for the Journal, so...

  February 9, 2009 3:48 PM

• hng said:

  Nothing--the Globe has very little for me--my main interest being in national and international news. (But I'm ready to fork over $10/month for access to the NYTimes online content the moment they start demanding it.)

  February 9, 2009 9:14 PM

• Dr.Jeff said:

  Sorry, there is no need to pay....too many free alternatives available

  February 9, 2009 10:20 PM

• Andy said:

  I'd probably pay up to $28 a year for boston.com access. More than that sounds too high, and I can nab the paper for free at work.

  February 10, 2009 12:11 AM

• Mr Punch said:

  I suspect that the success of this model will depend on the technology on which the content is read -- at present, the screen is not a substitute for hard copy for home use, because I don't read the same way.

  I do think my business would switch to online, though, because the interest there is in specific topics and articles, not general reading.  This may be why the WSJ has had relative success with paid online access.

  February 10, 2009 3:22 PM

• Dan Kennedy said:

  The Globe is important enough to me that I would pay it, but that doesn't mean Brill isn't proposing a huge mistake. With the print edition, we don't pay for the news, we pay for the newsprint, the ink, the manufacturing, and the distribution, as <A HREF="www.nytimes.com/.../10kinsley.html Kinsley explains</a> in today's Times.

  If I were Steve Ainsley, I'd try charging a much higher price for the print edition, and perhaps offering some premium content not available online, for the shrinking number of readers who want something to hold in their hands.

  Hard to know whether that would work, but walling off the Web is definitely not the solution.

  February 10, 2009 3:54 PM

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