"Giving away the news and charging for the olds"
Picking up on Mathew Ingram's revelation from Tuesday night, that after the Globe pushed his columns behind the paywall, his online readership dropped from around 10,000 to 300 readers per column - here's an excellent recent piece from Doc Searls, packed full of advice on how newspapers could unsuck themselves, if only they'd choose to do so.
Doc offers ten clues for building "Newspapers 2.0", starting with:
"First, stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. Okay, give away the news, if you have to, on your website. There's advertising money there. But please, open up the archives. Stop putting tomorrow's fishwrap behind paywalls. Writers hate it. Readers hate it. Worst of all, Google and Yahoo and Technorati and Icerocket and all your other search engines ignore it. Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisible."
Mathew - maybe you should print a bunch of copies of this and leave it strategically lying around on the desks of some of the management team over there...
Tags: newspapers, Mathew Ingram, Doc Searls, paywalls
