A New Crack at a Broken Model

Newspapers have hastened their own demise by offering their content on-line for free. Here in Rhody, an interesting approach: the Newport Daily News will soon allow on-line access only for subscribers.

Assistant Publisher William F. Lucey had this to say in a Daily News piece on the effort:

Lucey said he remembers many television watchers were against paying for cable service 20 years ago because they were used to getting free over-the-air channels. Lucey said that resistance dissipated over time.

“Back then, everyone scoffed at the notion of paying for cable TV, but that’s worked out pretty well,” Lucey said. “Over the past 10 years, we sat back and waited for the model of how newspapers would handle the Internet to evolve and, frankly, there is no one model that’s been shown to work, so we decided to take our own approach.”

It's a worthy endeavor. In an industry that has been extraordinarily unwilling to experiment, it's good to see a small paper take a chance. Now it's time for a big paper without a direct competitor - ProJo, anyone? - try something similar. Or better yet, why not kill its on-line product altogether? Just a thought.