Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Harmon - For general news, I'm not willing to use any single source, which means any single paper is only of fractional worth to me (and many others) compared to a specialist rag. I'd be willing to pay for a good agent which handled getting my news according to my set specifications, but not the news itself per-se.
|
Yeah, I've thought about that, too. Particularly if you could use the agent to narrow down the parameters of what you want to read about.
I think, though, that this is just another example of a situation where what is being sold is the access & convenience - in this case, the convenience of someone else parsing the news and selecting relevant pieces.
Newspapers like to think that they are in the information business, but I think they are really in the service business. As you point out, people don't want to pay for information,
per se, because they get it for free from all over the place. But they will pay for service - delivery, organization, editing, contexturalizing, cross-platform synchronization, cross-referencing, archiving, &c.
Actually, that's what newspapers used to do, but they seem to be unable to translate that service from the analog world to the digital world. Of course, in the analog world, that service seemed to be close to free, because advertising picked up most of the cost. Now papers have to charge more, so they need to deliver more. It seems to me, though, that there is more that can be delivered in the digital world, and not enough of it is actually being delivered.