Because some idiots decided awhile back that it was a really good idea to give away their content on-line for free. You have to pay fifty cents to two bucks for most papers if you want to pick up a dead-tree version at a newsstand, maybe half of that for home delivery, but you can read the stories on-line for free with only a few annoying advertisements, most of which can be blocked if you tinker with a script-blocker.
Giving away content for free. That was a really smart business decision.
The horse has left the barn on this; there are now too many places to get news for free. The New York Times pulled the plug on their pay service, "TimesSelect". The Wall Street Journal seems to be able to keep their pay-to-view operation going and there are some industry specific pay sites, but for the most part, the news industry has slit their own throats on this.
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Actually, newspapers have pretty much *always* given their content away for free. That subscription you pay for? It barely pays for the cost of the newsprint and the paper dude to plop it at your doorstep. At best. All the infrastructure (printing presses and such)? Paid for by advertising. All the reporters? Paid for by advertising. All the bought content from AP, Reuters, etc.? Paid for by advertising.
The basic problem isn't that newspapers are giving content away for free, because that's been their business model since, like, forever -- the news-stand price has never covered content. Rather, the basic problem is that newspapers screwed the pooch on Internet advertising. If newspapers had set up their classifieds sections online early on, Craigslist would have never existed and sucked the guts right out of their advertising. If newspapers had set up online jobs advertising systems early on with the ability to submit resumes through the newspaper's computer systems, Monster.com and its ilk would have never existed. And so on and so forth. There's a *ton* of ways that newspapers could make money online to replace the off-line advertising income, and they just freakin' screwed the poch on *all* of them, instead using their outrageous profit margins to buy up other media outlets all over the country, run up oodles of debt, and now... now that debt is killing them.
So the whole "giving content away" thing isn't their problem. It is the fact that, given a choice between investing in new technology (Internet advertising) and buying the Boston Globe, the New York Times decided to, err... buy the Boston Globe. Morons! They're like buggy manufacturers that invested in a new buggy assembly line to compete with Henry Ford's Model T, instead of themselves going into the automobiel industry!
- Badtux the Business Penguin
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