Bipartisanship I Can Believe In

by: Dean Barker

Tue Apr 06, 2010 at 20:57:53 PM EDT

Information wants to be free. Asking readers to pay for what they can get elsewhere is a bad idea. Subscriptions and newsstand sales never covered more than the distribution costs for newspapers, which relied on advertising. But the death of newspaper classified and the inability for pull page grocery and auto ads to transfer to the internet have sapped newspaper traditional revenues. It is unlikely that online subscriptions will either generate any significant revenue or drive people to pick up the paper. It is likely to decrease the distribution, and thus the influence, of their product.