On the other hand, there are many articles that appear in the print edition that are not shown on the knoxnews.com web page. But if you google the articles, you can often find a link. The knoxnews web site search box never seems to bring up these "hidden" articles, so I have quit using it.

What's truly novel is the now commonplace expectation that it should all come to you for free. Presumably this is simply because the publishers of these and other newspapers lacked foresight when they saw the internet as a novelty and began putting content out there for free because there seemed to be no practical ways to charge for it, and all the competition was free online, so how do you compete with that?

I think the problem has to do with online advertising. Advertisers don't see the value of online advertising, which is much more measurable in terms of coverage and response. Plus, a printed newspaper has a lot more space for ads, even if they end up at the bottom of a bird cage.

Online ads should command a premium because of all that, plus the ability to run highly targeted ads, but I think Google has ruined the business. They are making all the money a few pennies at a time because of their massive scale and reach. And because of that, they have driven prices down.

Advertisers won't pay for impressions (exposure, identity, brand awareness, etc.) any more like they will for print advertising. They will only pay for clicks, and there's a trend towards only paying for conversions (i.e. commissions).

Print advertising isn't measured by these standards, maybe because it can't be as precisely measured. But because online ads can be measured, advertisers see low click-thru and high bounce rates and run away. They seem to discount the value of the branding and exposure aspects similar to what they get from print advertising.

Curiously, 30 second TV spot advertising does not seem to have any of these perception problems, and advertisers are willing to pay huge amounts for such an ephemeral product.

But I'm no expert on any of this, so I could be completely wrong.

Anyway, I'm not advocating for free online newspapers. I would like to see better value and affordability, though.

(link...)

I have noticed that some of the papers that I occasionally browse online have backed off from even limited access to articles.

It is not a good strategy to block your content from viewers if you have an online presence. Even I know that.

I believe Sunday print editions are a daily paper's cash-cow. Lots of advertising and coupon inserts. The higher the delivery count, the more they can charge the advertisers. It's worth it to them to subsidize digital subscriptions if you'll take the Sunday paper.

I too pay $15/month for the NY Times.

-- OneTahiti

Reading comprehension fail.

P.S. We've probably been paying for subscriptions to newspapers and news magazines for longer than you've been alive. So you kids get off my lawn!

After print dies, online advertising will slowly begin to climb the same ladder of credibility that print once had to climb. On line advertisng offer much better metrics for measuring effectiveness.

But online news will not be delivered in its current form. Reading a physical paper is still more convenient than wading through an online site and waiting for pages to load. A successful online news site needs to filter and deliver news based on individual interests, and the most successful people at that are apps that coalesce content from different sources, such as Flipboard (there are many).

The licensing will not be with the individual consumer- the news creators need to license to the aggregators, in the same model that the old UPI and current API has done with newspapers for decades.

The problem is:

1. It cuts out of the advertising sales loop organizations who think they can present the content and sell their own advertising (e.g., KNS). Therefore, they will resist this to the very end.

2. It means the value is in generating the original content, not recycling someone else's wire stories. I would pay $1 per column for Sandra and Betty's original journalism. I'm sure there are plenty of people in Knoxville who would have paid $0.20 a day or more for the Jamie's daily update on the Christian/Newsom trials. Multiply each of those numbers that 100,000, and clearly you can pay for real journalism.

It's not about "print media", it's about the model of delivery. If KNS could deliver a custom-generated print newspaper to my door with the news on topics I actually want to read, I'd subscribe, no matter if it was a physical paper or an online aggregator app. But right now, old news companies are missing the boat on delivering what people actually want- aggregated information.

Consider my Dish Network interface- the #1 most important feature is that I can create one or more "Favorites' lists, narrowing the 800+ channels I have down to the 15-20 that might have something on I actually want to watch. Consider the analogy of the DVR as well (aggregator apps should retain history back several weeks-- another thing I hate about sites like KNS is if I miss the news for a few days, it's hard to go back, and the search functions suck).

If I were CEO of Scripps, I'd throw $2M into developing an aggregator app like Flipboard that allows people to subscribe to 50-ish topics, local and national, and then charge $15/mo to use the aggregated stream- or perhaps a model of $10 for 3-5 "channels" and $1 per additional channel. And I'd throw gobs of money into the generation of new local content (schools, politics, crime by ZIP code, etc) that would create streams people couldn't get elsewhere. There used to be a name for that....

... oh, right. Journalism.

I'm not necessarily limiting the system to automatic computer aggregators. The best aggregators have human input, like blogs that link to a story, but add a particular analysis, or link two or three stories together in a way that provides a unique perspective.