Daring Fireball: Charging for Access to News Sites

John Gruber at Daring Fireball re-iterates the “Glaringly obvious” faults in the proposed model for charging to access online news content.

Citing the Financial Times editors comments that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year he goes on to describe why that is a flawed strategy.

“The question these companies should be asking is, “How do we keep reporting and publishing good content?” Instead, though, they’re asking “How do we keep making enough money to support our existing management and advertising divisions?” It’s dinosaurs and mammals.

And it’s not really surprising that they’re failing to evolve. The decision-makers — the executives sitting atop large non-editorial management bureaucracies — are exactly the people who need to go if newspapers are going to remain profitable.”