Well, good luck with that:
Newspaper company Gannett recently announced that it would be setting up a paywall for four Indiana publications: The Indianapolis Star, the Journal and Courier in Lafayette, the Star Press in Muncie and the Palladium-Item in Richmond, according to Inside Indiana Business.
In a press release, Gannett said part of its plan for expanding capital and strengthening its financial outlook would be to charge for all of its online content "regardless of platform." The plan will also curtail non-subscriber access, a model that it hopes will enable the company to add $100 million to its publishing segment's annual earnings as of 2013.
Actually, I do wish them well. If newspapers don't figure out how to make a healthy profit from digital operations, that will speed up our demise. But I remain skeptical. If newspapers had started charging for online access from the start, people might have been used to it by now. But, stupidly (unbelievably, insanely), our response to the new Internet reality was to offer people the same stuff online for free sooner that we then tried to get them to pay for later. Duh! Now there's too much information from too many sources, and people expect to get it for free. If I want to know something about Indianapolis or Indiana, I don't have to depend on the Star. Some big newspapers with a breadth and depth pf coverage (like the NYT) or specialized coverage (WSJ) can make a paywall work. But the rest of us? Not so much.
