WI print newspapers don't put their content online

. . . means you end up trying to find out what people want to see/hear and tailor to that. This is troubling if not outright dangerous for journalistic diversity/integrity.
To me, it has to be a tension. What people want to know vs. what you as a writer think they need to know. For example, on the subject of youth football and brain safety, a lot of parents think the key is concussion management, whereas a lot of the medical thinking and at least a few studies is that the lion’s share of CTE is all the accumulated subconcussive hits. Well, you’ve got to tell parents this in a straightforward fashion.

I’ve also had some success here at AH and elsewhere making the working assumption that my reader is actually slightly smarter than I am, just that he or she doesn’t know this particular topic.
 
It would take a nearly ASB-like scenario to prevent newspapers from going online, too, after the rise of the Internet, because:

1) Their previous revenue model, based on paper, is directly by the Internet threatened so there is an irresistible drive to go online as well and try to capture a slice of that market

2) The state would have no clear incentive to protect lots of private newspapers, just as the state has no incentive to protect paper books and forbid ebooks
 
Several good points in the earlier comments. I want to highlight two of them.

First, there definitely seems to have been a decline in the quality of American newspapers and periodicals, which becomes obvious if you read editions dating from the 1970s and 1980s. They would have had a problem, maybe a bigger problem, without the internet.

Tied to this, as someone pointed, a good deal of news is just reprinting what governments and corporations put out, and with the internet you can go to the government sites directly.

Second, newspapers relied heavily on classified listings for real estate and employment. That is pretty much all done through online searches that are not done through the news sites. In fact a large reason people seem to have been buying newspapers in the past was for the listings.

This blog post touches on a lot of this, from a right wing perspective: http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=13789
 
As a model of business its brilliant but only for the bigger media outlets, in terms of maintaining journalistic standards its not great. More clicks means more revenue, but the methods of getting more clicks is now a big problem and not everyone can compete. ...

Emphasis on Click Bait. Its the same as the old editorial rule "If it Bleeds It Leads". In the old days sidewalk and lobby newspaper vendors were common as pop ups on the internet. A good headline visible to the passerby's got the coins out of their pockets & into the box.
 
But it might take a while before they develop seasoned reporters and established working relations between reporters and editors such that they can really compete with the New York Times, Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, etc.

Politico started up in 2007 and was an immediately credible outlet due to their founders, editors and the reporters they hired. And it was always primarily an internet news outlet despite the publication of a free print edition distributed around DC. If you hire enough of the right kinds of people, establishing credibility and a working relationship with sources is more or less instantaneous.

Had the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. been prevented from publishing online, something would have arisen that produced a similar quality of journalism, perhaps by hiring away some of the reporters from the Times and Post.
 
Politico started up in 2007 and was an immediately credible outlet due to their founders, editors and the reporters they hired. And it was always primarily an internet news outlet despite the publication of a free print edition distributed around DC. If you hire enough of the right kinds of people, establishing credibility and a working relationship with sources is more or less instantaneous. . .
I’ve since modified to the proposition, sometimes works out. ;)

To use an analogy, sometimes you can put together a new sports franchise quickly. Other new franchises struggle for years, first swinging too far in one direction, and then making an abrupt shift to swing too far in another (for example, too frugal on money, then too free spending, then too abruptly frugal again)
 
OK, let us step back in time before I remember newspaper websites.

What did we have? We had the TV NEWS on websites (BBC, NBC, ABC etc) and we had news agencies (AFP, Reuters) and we had news aggregators like Ananova

Now, you also have a conundrum because unless ICANN makes it illegal for print newspapers to put their content online then someone like the Lebanon Daily Star (the first newspaper I remember reading online) will do this. Then you have the question as to WHY newspapers are letting the online world be taken over by everyone else?

OK, so they then set it up so you can read it if you pay? I know SOME people do, but this is essentially the Bloomberg views of things, and the vast majority of people just ignore this and get their news from what is free.

By the time you come to the creation of things like Twitter, are newspapers going to stay off it? I still find it absolutely fucking ridiculous that The Times is on Twitter since every story they link to you can't fucking read without paying. Some other websites allow you X number of Twitter click-throughs a month, on the basis that if you've read their tweet and clicked then you deserve to read the bloody story.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I still find it absolutely fucking ridiculous that The Times is on Twitter since every story they link to you can't fucking read without paying. Some other websites allow you X number of Twitter click-throughs a month, on the basis that if you've read their tweet and clicked then you deserve to read the bloody story.
how is this different from showing the headlines from a newspaper stand but you still have to pay to buy the paper and read the story?
 
how is this different from showing the headlines from a newspaper stand but you still have to pay to buy the paper and read the story?

I don't know, but I also don't know how this is relevant

The internet works on links - if your link goes to a paywall that says PAY ME NOW then its a fucking useless link

Everybody else's link goes to places which have the story

Now, for the sake of this thread, maybe ALL newspapers would go to a paywall, EXCEPT THE ONE WHO DECIDED NOT TO

That is how the market works.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I don't know, but I also don't know how this is relevant

The internet works on links - if your link goes to a paywall that says PAY ME NOW then its a fucking useless link

Everybody else's link goes to places which have the story

Now, for the sake of this thread, maybe ALL newspapers would go to a paywall, EXCEPT THE ONE WHO DECIDED NOT TO

That is how the market works.
I't not much different from how newspapers were traditionally sold: show someone a headline but if you want to read the whole story (i.e the link), you have to pay for it, I don't understand the anger or annoyance over it

the real difference is that the internet created a culture of "free", and that in part was created by newspapers putting their contents online for free in the early 2000s and it's pretty easy to steal other people's content online


Now, for the sake of this thread, maybe ALL newspapers would go to a paywall, EXCEPT THE ONE WHO DECIDED NOT TO
there has always being really bad free newspapers around too back in the old days, I still get unasked newspapers delivered to my house once in a while, that doesn't mean it's the one everyone reads
 
I remember when I first came to the internet, I was suspicious of Yahoo cos I couldn't believe they would give me an email address for free, but they did, I was suspicious of FortuneCity for the same reason re websites. I had no money and back then it was much harder to pay online anyway. I wouldn't have done either of those things if they cost money
 
Online magazines started soon after the WWW and browsers turned the Internets into a mass product. Slate was founded in 1996 and was owned by Microsoft. Its roster of writers was solid second tier early on, and some became superstars later with political events - namely, Christopher Hitchens who became the biggest leftist voice supporting the Iraq War, and Paul Krugman who later moved to the New York Times. Blogs started around 2000 and became huge after 9/11, and it's likely that if they couldn't just link to articles in traditional media, the warbloggers would start doing original reporting and turn into media stars more quickly than they did in OTL.
 
. . . and Paul Krugman who later moved to the New York Times. . .
Paul’s an economist and I think he was great during the 2008-09 Great Recession. He said, with this serious a downturn, you need serious deficit spending to juice the economy. And to do this quickly, you need to cut taxes including cutting withholding.

He said, infrastructure is very popular, but it won’t ramp up quickly enough to make a big enough of a difference soon enough. Infrastructure is more of a medium time-frame response, and people need to understand that most of the jobs created will be temporary.

But . . . Paul Krugman is a flowery writer and that doesn’t serve him well in a field a lot of people just aren’t that familiar with. I mean, not near enough people follow the important economic numbers like people follow baseball numbers.
 
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