Can Online Subscriptions Save the News? - Chris Anderson

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/09/23/Free-Conomics_with_Chris_Anderson

Wired editor and author Chris Anderson speculates that the low cost of digital publishing may facilitate newspapers to generate sufficient revenue by charging subscriptions for premium content, thus cutting off dependency on advertisers and saving the industry.

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Apparently there is such a thing as a free lunch. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails capitalized on offering their music for free, Google lets us search, e-mail and use all kinds of free applications, and ATT will give you a cell phone gratis, if you just buy their monthly plan. These are only a fraction of the businesses that have helped to establish a full-fledged economy based on the concept of zero dollars down.

Wired's Chris Anderson explains the recent phenomenon of making lots of money by charging nothing. Is everything moving toward "free now, pay later"? What are the consequences? - Commonwealth Club of California

Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, which has won a National Magazine Award under his tenure. He coined the phrase "The Long Tail" in an acclaimed Wired article, which he expanded upon in the book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006). He currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and four young children. Before joining Wired in 2001, he worked at The Economist, where he launched their coverage of the Internet. He also has a degree in physics from George Washington University and did research at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has also worked at the prestigious journals Nature and Science.

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[CulturalEngineer]

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[marsCubed]

oops, risk and sometimes failure or not even being popular i mean. like supporting the royal Shakespear company is good for all of show biz.

[marsCubed]

Slug99, it all becomes exactly similar in a competitive system, good ideas get squeezed out by everybody else having exactly the same good idea until there is saturation and barrel scraping for the contract which makes or breaks an enterprise.

It becomes populism and tabloids, in truth that is the problem with the US press, and indeed with youtube.

It works much better if there is a balance. some sectors then being able to produce the kind of quality which requires risk. others must keep pace.

[Slug99]

Are you on drugs or something? He is talking about availability, not quality of content. He is absolutely right that if you run ads in your paper you will be able to lower the fee you charge your readers because you're using advertisers to subsides the readers.

I mean the 99.9999% of the internet works that way. YOu use adverts to pay for the servers and bandwidth so that you can offer your website for free. This is why youtube is 100% free, had it been a pay-to-use service it wouldn't work

[Monchanger]

zet- I think it used to be a matter of strengths. Next-day newspapers offer quality where cable news can offer expediency. Want to know as soon as possible that a tsunami hit Samoa so you can check in on relatives living there? Use cable news. Want to learn more about earthquakes and tsunamis, wait for the next day and read a well-written article.

The Internet blurs this line between the two, with newspapers getting faster publishing and multimedia capabilities.

[marsCubed]

I probably read more American newspapers than the average American.

The thing is, I see the punch-line coming in the American press. The style is also very formal, like a press release, there is no alternative view unless it is the right's agenda in the editorials.

It just quite literally is very boring, compared to something like the UK Guardian, which I don't think the Average American would be able to put down,

NEW ideas and info not Bill o' Riley 'informing' us of the lefts' opinion.

[marsCubed]

"advertising means more people get news papers for less"

No it doesn't. the advertising model means fewer people get newspapers as advertisers dumb it down to the level of dogma and scams. American readers got fed up with it years ago.

Bigotry on Fox is one thing, actually reading through crap like that is not so easy, there is no info, nothing for the reader, in print it is a chore to read the right's boring corp love, it is just another ad..

corp praising sycophancy

is boring as hell.

[zet168]

Aside from some interesting columns now and then aren't newspapers kind of pointless? Why pay money to read yesterday's news? I'm not a big fan of the whole 24-7 news cycle but I'm not going to pay money to read things I already know.