Study finds some newspapers successful with a pay model

ShareThisAn analysis by Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment in the New York Times, shows that newspapers charging for online content did not have a significant decline in traffic. The papers set a  conservative limit for the number of articles visitors could read free each month, and by making clear that most readers would not be affected.

Comments

Despite understanding why publications want to charge people to read their content online, I'm skeptical that it will ever work. The nature of the internet is to democratize information. Thinking under that same logic, it seems irrational for anyone to sit on one source for all their news. Why not simply read as much as you can for free then move on to the next site and do the same? It seems to me that the people hardest hit by this idea would be academic institutions and professionals who require in depth access. Is that a fair burden?

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