It must be like riding on a roller coaster that only goes downward.
Newspapers have struggled for years with the problem of declining circulation. They have attempted to blunt this decline, but readers and advertisers have migrated to the web in large numbers. Their half-baked attempts to evolve with the reading habits of the masses have failed.
One of the sites that I visit daily is the NY Times. In the past, they have experimented with limiting free access to their site by installing a subscription service.
No thank you.
Other newspapers have tried this. During the Jets playoff run, I went to the New Your Newsday site because I wanted to read some local coverage of the team. Newsday has gone to a subscription service model, charging $5 per week.
No thank you.
Now, I don’t begrudge newspapers their attempts to earn revenue. After all, they are businesses and businesses must have paying customers to survive. The problem: once people get something for free, they are unlikely to be willing to pay for it – ever!
So what are newspapers to do? It’s a tough problem to solve to be sure.
The Times Reader 2.0 application was launched last May. I saw the banner adds and read the reviews, but I was unconvinced. I finally tried it today and found that the text is crystal clear, the navigation is streamlined, the full content downloads to your laptop in no time, and you can even do the crossword puzzle from within the application. Sweet! The subscription price is $14.95 per month.
Yes, thank you. I subscribed this morning.
I know that many will not be as impressed as I am with the Times Reader, and that’s okay. The important thing is that this is the first example, which I can recall, of a newspaper taking an innovative approach to changing their business model.
The emergence of the blogosphere as a news reporting mechanism has been great – especially for covering politics. The more eyes that there are to watch our elected officials, the better off we all are. But I also believe that traditional newspapers (with their editors, depth and breadth of reporting, and reach) are important and that they should not be allowed to fade into oblivion. To avoid this fate, newspapers must continue to come up with and improve upon innovative delivery systems that adapt to not only what people want to read but also to how they want to read it.
Let’s hope that Times Reader 2.0 is just an interim step toward forestalling the demise of newspapers and that this application, as good as it is, is not the end of their evolutionary process.
Author Bio:
Ray Colon has written 136 posts on Ray's Blog.
He works with numbers for a living, but don't judge - boring accountants need love too. His blog has no niche (unless writing about things that are important to him is a niche). Some folks cringe when he gets “all political” on them, but he does it anyway when he's in that kind of mood. Sometimes, he writes something nice about someone, but you shouldn't get used to that. His first book, the one he hasn't written yet, is not available on Amazon. Subscribe to Ray's Blog via RSS or Email.
