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New York Times: We Won't Have to Shutter The Boston Globe After All

This negotiation appears to be a bit of a farce . NYT said the Globe was on pace to losing $85 million so if they saved $20 million they could keep it open? If it was about economics, they would close it anyway, even after the concessions. It seems NYT just wanted to get what it could through threatening, but never planned to close it for losing money anyway. Why is a $65 million loss ok? Or any loss at all. The Sulzbergers will act uneconomically as long as they can afford to. That's their right, and one of the privileges of ownership, The non-controlling shareholders should recognize this and act accordingly.

1981 News Report Predicts the Death of Print Newspapers

Thanks for digging that out. Compuserve, Knight Ridder, and Dow Jones News Retrieval were there back then, followed shortly by Prodigy and later AOL. Unfortunately for newspapers, customers got in the habit of paying for access, rather than for content. Even now, people are happy to pay their cable company for access to the internet, but not for the content on it. That said, Dow Jones News Retrieval was charging all along, and eventually went to a $25 per month flat fee, and the primary benefit was getting the WSJ - which is probably one reason they felt they could charge for the WSJ on the internet.

Some Internet Lessons from the Close of Portfolio

Why do you think its success or failure had anything to do with how it reached readers? The real customers here are the advertisers.

Conde Nast specializes in serving advertisers who of luxury goods like watches and fashion, and those glossy ads are the last things that will move to the web. So how do you test this on the web?

Portfolio had a decent high-end audience. Editorially, it was ok. But in this advertising environment, the advertisers stuck with Vanity Fair and other titles, not needing something new.

The lesson here is about trying to expand in a down market, not about internet testing of glossy magazine ads.

Why Does WSJ.com Charge For Content?

WSJ.com was started in 1996, made possible in its current form by the development of Web Browsers. But for the 10 or 15 years prior to that, Dow Jones was selling WSJ content over telephone lines to customers with modems for a fee. I think the last fee was $25 per month for unlimited usage, but prior to that they charged by KB or by time, as did Compuserve, Prodigy and the early AOL. When WSJ.com was started, it was in some sense an upgrade to the News Retrieval product, and why stop charging for something when people already had proved they would pay. I think DJ's early ventures into electronic pubishing provided knowledge and research that led to the paid model, and a successful one, for its content. Kann's modesty aside, the decision to pay at DJ was an outgrowth of what had gone on before there, and not just a flip of the coin accident.

The Financial Times Launches Its Own Business News Search Engine (Newssift)

This could spell the end of Factiva....

The Issue of Trust is with Google, Not Viacom

I know you want privacy protected, but once a judge orders Google to hand something over, to not hand it over would be to violate the law. You shouldn't expect a company to violate the law to preserve your "trust."

The Latest Nail In Newspapers' Coffin: Outsourcing

The Wall Street Journal has long "outsourced" copy editing and layout of it's European and Asian editions to South Brunswick, New Jersey. There was a lot of hand wringing at first as to whether people in NJ would get right the details of local European or Asian stories, given their presumed lack of knowledge of the regions and key players. Has it worked out - you can never tell because you can't tell how the papers would have done without the change. But you can tell that that the costs cuts were achieved. It takes vision to put the unprovable gains of quality against provable cost cuts. That type of vision is now very rare in the newspaper industry.