Newspapers May Fade Away Because...

John Batelle has an excellent post explaining why the subscription models of the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, neither of which support deep linking, are pushing both publications towards irrelevance. I suppose I’ll be one of the last holdouts for physical newspapers and magazines – I take the subway and bus too much – but it’s not farfetched to see that increasingly people will acquire daily information in what John describes as the “Pull to Point” method – reading things that have been pointed to by others, rather than only those he pulls down himself. I gave up the FT in print several years ago, and only occasionally go to the online site that I pay for. While I can’t see giving up the WSJ or the New York Times, the amount of time I spend with them is limited to my daily subway ride – the Times in the morning and the Journal on the way home.

Comments

[Olivier Travers]

Battelle might be right about the WSJ (though with 600K paid subscribers they're not exactly complaining) but he's completely mistaken about The Economist, which despite calling itself a newspaper is a weekly magazine. First, once you've sampled it you don't need the web herd to tell you to read it thanks to the strength of their brand and content. Second, it's inaccurate to say they don't support deep linking, as economist.com has plenty of free articles you can directly link to. Third, again it's a weekly with in-depth reports and articles. Do I want to read a 14-page economics or country survey online anyway? I didn't think so. Fourth, those two publications are actually making money online, including through ad sales. Of course they do, they have the most affluent and influential audience.

Just because Battelle has made a career as a publisher focused on short-attention span readers doesn't mean he has anything meaningful to say about those who have actual content to sell to their readers (who, moreover, are not always glued to their PC all day long).

[Steve Goldstein]

Olivier - I agree with you about The Economist being different than the WSJ or NYT. But unless it's changed recently, the online version of Economist is not fun. So, reading between the lines of Battelle's post, if the online Economist was fun, they might widen the subscription/readership base.