Pick a business model and stick with it why don’t you

The newspaper and magazine industries started off with many titles only available behind a pay wall.

The pay wall for all but a handful of pubs dropped when advertising revenue was seen as a deep pool of wealth that would last forever.

Now that we can see the bottom of that pool they want to resurrect the pay wall exactly at a moment when the average media consumer – already accustomed now to not paying for access to the online newspaper – doesn’t have nearly the disposable income they once did. There are serious stories about people who are considering going back to dial-up internet as a cost-saving move, for crying out loud. So why The New York Times or anyone else thinks people are going to happily pay for access to stories they can instead get through continuing-to-be-free blogs is beyond me.

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