I consider myself quite the newshound. I enjoy waking up in the morning and finding out what excitement I missed out on the night before. As can be expected, my usual forms of taking in the news include watching the morning news on TV, listening to news radio in the car, scanning through the newspaper if I am bored when I get home at the end of the day, and of course the Internet; all day everyday.
I can see how the newspapers are hurting to turn a profit, mainly because they are at the bottom of my news intake chain. I am surprised that it is taking the newspapers so long to figure out that there seems to be a revenue source that is right under their noses but they are too afraid to make the leap. I propose two ideas that I feel would assist in boosting the profitability of the near bankrupt newspapers throughout the country.
1) Charge more for your subscription. I know that it can’t be cheap printing all of that ink on a daily basis and you should be compensated to at least cover the bottom line costs. Considering what you guys charge for a monthly subcription that gets delivered to my door everyday, I am truly amazed that you have kept it going this long. I know the economy is tough right now, but the true fans of your daily publication will gladly pay a little more just for the valuable coupons alone.
2) Like many other people out there, I crave for my news online. I want quick easy access to the news and I want it now. I want to be informed so much so that I have included the daily news as my homepage when I first open up my Internet and SFGate.com (aka San Francisco Chronicle) has been my homepage for as long as I can remember, and the truth is, I don’t even subscribe to their paper I live in the East Bay I subscribe to the Argus. Therefore, it seems that charging a fee for access to this website would only seem logical. That being said, it should be a ridiculously low fee for the online subscription, but by all means you should at least be charging for an online subscription. Trust me, I pay a lot more to other websites for a monthly subscription fee and I don’t get anywhere near the information that I get from my newspapers website.
Also, one thing that I have noticed is severly lacking on news sites accross the country is the ability to subscribe to a quality RSS feed. I know why you don’t include a quality RSS feed but maybe you should start trying to charge for a quality RSS feed subscription, I know that I would personally welcome the option.
Now before you start going crazy charging me too much for too little. Let me recap my point. Charge more for your printed publication and charge very little for your online publication and include a quality RSS feed. You might lose me as a subscriber to your printed publication considering that these ARE tough economic times, but I can guarantee that I would increase my subscription to ALL of my favorite news publishers online (if they were priced accordingly).
Anyway, that’s just my two cents.