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Originally Posted by Sonist
What Jobs did is sell the idea that the newspaper/magazine publishers can finally monetize their content.
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Incorrect.
The WSJ has had a paywall for years, and Murdoch (whose company owns the WSJ, MySpace and lots of media outlets) was barking about putting up a paywall months before the iPad was confirmed. The NY Times was also talking about it internally for months prior to the iPad announcement as well. Kindle has had paid magazine and newspaper subscriptions for a few years now. In fact, discussions about the Kindle DX also raised the hopes of periodicals for getting paid for their content as well, and that was last spring/summer.
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Originally Posted by Sonist
I am not at all sure it will fly.
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In case you didn't get the memo, free access for any news other than op-ed is not really working.
Newspapers are getting killed by low web ad rates and declining paper subscriptions. Since they can't squeeze any more money out of advertisers, the only other way to increase revenues is to get it from the readers.
And as per usual, while the costs of distribution are dropping precipitously, the cost to actually report the news -- to send reporters to locations, to do the grunt work of sorting through government or business documents, to take photos with the slightest degree of professionalism -- has not changed, and constitutes a huge chunk of the costs.
Blogs can continue, of course (and provide worthwhile contributions), as it's relatively cheap to sit in your home office and opine all day long. But bloggers aren't willing or able to do much of the grunt work or travel out of their home region to do real reporting.
Either news outlets will start charging for content, or they will go out of business -- or more likely, some of both will happen. The aggregators will slowly have fewer and fewer free outlets, either via paywalls or attrition of their sources. The days of ubiquitous free
news content may be numbered.