On second thought, the Times isn’t raising its price nearly high enough. $1.25? Hell, make it $2.50 a day. $5.00! In the old days, when you were monomedia, this would only drive readers away. But now, if your journalism is good and needed, it will drive people online, which is just where you need to push them. Rather than waiting for them to go online, get ahead of them. Yes, I know, the margins are lower but there’s not much you can do about that, about losing your monopoly and the value of scarcity. It’s reality. So go with that flow: Force people to go online. Force your advertisers to go there as the audience does. The old, limited product becomes smaller but, thanks to that $5 cover price, still profitable — until it isn’t anymore, and then you better have figured out your internet business model or you’re doomed anyway. So put an ATM next to every newsbox. Charge a fortune, Times.
12 responses to “On second thought”
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Why not? It’s working so well for the U.S. Post Office :)
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Do we really want newspapers only to be available online? I still haven’t got wireless broadband in the bus I’m using every day… Maybe it’s only us norwegians? :-)
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@Radiohode
I think that in 5-10 years you will probably be reading news off your PDA or your mobile phone – alternatively you might be listening to a podcast.
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I have an idea,
How about you send the Times to us as a gift!
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@Jacob
I might. But will I want to?
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I have a laptop and wifi and a smartphone and I still pay a silly amount of money to have the Sunday NY Times delivered to my doorstep. It’s just much more pleasurable to give the screen a rest for a few hours and sit in my bathrobe on the couch with my coffee and a real paper. I fully understand that the contents of the paper are available for free on the laptop sitting on my desk, but I refuse to open it.
So I agree, Jeff — to me the print edition is a luxury, not a necessity. And therefore I’m willing to pay far more than it’s “worth.” Certainly there’s a ceiling, but we’re not there yet, even at $6/week.
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If a paper copy cost $5, there’d be an increase in newstand warezing: “Hey, buddy, psst, want a copy for half-price…?”
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Hmmm, i think that there’s something wrong with me coz i don’t understand one thing :-)
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Hey Frank Congrats on the 300th episode!
If you are ever in NY, a copy of the $5.00 times on me.
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Jeff, isn’t the Times in a privileged position? (they are among the few who did some experimenting and ended up with a working solution) it seems to me that most publications just haven’t figured out how to make it work (financially) online and really need to buy as much time as they can — if you don’t have the Times’ stature, making it work online can be extremely difficult… (and it wasn’t exactly easy for the Times either… took them a while…) D.
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If you believe in human caused global warming then shouldn’t we insist that all newspapers be available only online. Think of the damage of cutting down all those trees, converting them to paper and then delivering the papers all over the planet.
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The price of my weekend subscription just went up, according to a letter with my copy of the Sunday Times.
The good news, they tell me, is that although the price is going up, I now get Times “All Access.” It’s a package of all their online premium services.
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[…] format. Jeff Jarvis says “BFD.” Also, Jarvis thinks the New York Times is right to raise its price to $1.25 a copy and I agree. Eventually, inevitably, newspapers will have to switch to online distribution as their […]
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