San Francisco Chronicle
David Lazarus wrote that it's time for newspapers to stop giving away the store.
Jon Carroll notes that it's
always time for anyone who's giving away the store to stop doing it, "but this particular maneuver might be tricky. Clearly newspaper websites can't charge for the news, because the news is available just everywhere, and people will not pay for what they can get for free." Carroll isn't interested in a TimesSelect-like model "because hits on specific columnists could be tracked, columnists could be judged like salesmen. If I had an underperforming quarter, if Lazarus beat the socks off me in readership numbers, I'd be traded to the Boise Herald for two movie reviewers and a cartoonist to be named later." || Related
letter.
