Thursday, October 8, 2009

Don't trust licence plates

Quebec’s plate offers the enigmatic Je me souviens. Beautiful British Columbia is straightforward. Ontario promotes, promotes, promotes Yours to Discover.

Friendly Manitoba may describe the good people who live within its prairie borders, but it masks the mood of some online newspapers.

There doesn’t seem to be much consensus about the best business model for online news. How much do you charge for web advertising when the overhead is less than print? Will the public pay for news? Will the public pay for anything?

Yesterday’s news is more valuable than today’s headlines at the weekly Boissevain Recorder. An annual online subscription is $40 and up to $190 per year for access to its archives dating back to 2004. Its website only offers one article every Friday. Read it while you can. The price will jump in a year to view it.

The Brandon Sun online content is free to seven-day home delivery subscribers. Selling milk to a cow. Despite already having a subscription, they still have to register online, input their account number, username, password, DNA, retinal scan, fecal smear, presumably each time they visit unless their computers are set to remember the data.

The site offers the first few sentences of an article and the chance to click to view the full story, only to direct users to an order form.

It took a while to find how to type an umlaut, but it’s worth it to mention the Lögberg Heimskringla, a Winnipeg-based publication featuring Icelandic culture, yours online for only $35 a year. The closer you live to its home base, the more you pay. A one-year print subscription is $47.25 anywhere in Canada, and bumps up to $50.40 if you live in Manitoba.

Takið þið við krítarkortum?

The Hyper Journalist

-30-

No comments:

Post a Comment