Why, no! Think of the loss to their pinpoint accurate advertising! Their ads for specials at the local mall are so tempting, I would imagine people are jumping into airplanes all across the land to take advantage of them!

1) This industry needs to learn how to thrive on profit margins that are decidely less than double the average of the Fortune 500.
2) This industry needs to harness technology to reduce costs without sacrificing the quality of their content. (I live in a college town. A letter to the editor today described how the university is hiring 16 administrative types at $144k/year while greatly expanding the percentage of part-time academics who are paid 40% of the compensation currently paid to f/t professors and w/o benefits. Guess what is going to suffer? I suspect the special people in the MSM also misallocate funds.)
3) There will always be subscribers. I climb in bed with the New Yorker not with my laptop. And, I do prefer the print version of the WSJ and I routinely pick up magazines. Subscription rates simply won’t grow at the rates that had been previously forecasted. The task at hand is to keep the subscription rates currently in place.
4) We’re a nation of news junkies. They’ll figure this out.

I still think an individual in a foreign country should be able to access our media without filters or have articles subject to interpretation by local journalists. Sometimes, items of importance get lost in translation. Other times, local journalists may not be able to get stories published.

Maybe that content wouldn’t exist if jounalists couldn’t be paid to create it because of a lack of subscription revenue. Hopefully the journalists in developing countries will subscribe, maybe at a discount, and spread the ideas, if not the exact words, on to their readers with the benefit local context.

This drives some of us, well, nuts. We buy and sell a product–gathering news and ads and putting them into a package that is meant to serve readers and advertisers. HOW we do that internally is less relevant than the fact that it needs to be done (I’m a big believer in the notion that a newspaper helps contribute to the community, civics, etc.) But as you’ve often said, if we don’t satisfy and serve these readers and advertisers in our present form, our “specialness” won’t help us survive.

The ability to figure this out, and fast, is not especially promising, given the industry’s lack of cooperation and trust among its members.

I would certainly consider paying $199/year if and when the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor also started placing their content behind a paid subscription. (I’d sign on just to get access to the Financial Times, assuming it was included. Currently, my employer pays for the WSJ.)

My fear is that many households in this country and certainly many households in developing countries cannot afford to access paid content. This would be a shame. I think the worlds stands gain if a Venezuelan can read an article on what went dreadfully wrong in Zimbabwe’s land reform or what went right in Malaysia’s refusal to follow orthodox IMF remedies.