2) If a site wanted to charge $3 a week for news online, it would never work out. There are to many other sources online for free. You would have to get every news site, blog, etc, to follow the same basic pattern and that would never be possible. There will always be holes where someone can get the information. The large papers might be able to pull off a subscriber-based online business strategy…NYT, Wash Post, perhaps even Drudge to a certain level, but I think that relying upon an ‘online subscriber’ base or paid subscribers is part of the reason that print journalism is currently taking a hit. People don’t need all the AP articles, they don’t want to read all the ‘filler’ material that goes into a newspaper. The Internet has given them the choice of what they want to read and when they want it. They don’t have to buy into the whole program or own the whole issue to get the news they want. It is different times that require a completely different business model to survive. If newspapers want to run their sites like their newspapers…they simply will not be successful online.

Thanks for the good discussion.