I don’t know if anyone else has ever come up with this exact idea, but I think it’s interesting. I know people have tried all sorts of ideas, and keep coming up dead-ended.
What if the Chicago Reader stopped making physically printed paper-newspapers altogether, then converted the Reader to a scrictly online, subscription-based newspaper service? This way, the majority of revenue would have to go to keeping the server up to date and upgraded.
OR
Continue to manufacture the paper-newspaper, in addition to, the ONLINE paper which would still be subscription based.
My local newspaper has done something along of the latter idea. You can subscribe to their online archives, which dates back 10 years, and look up stuff accordingly. The web paper matches the all of the printed paper, and has many many extras as well. Our daily paper online is free, however. I think the cut-off for archived pages is 2 weeks. If its older than 2 weeks, you have to pay to access it.
Well I would have been severely pissed to have wandered along on a friday to pick up the Reader (to read while eating lunch) only to find a sign saying “Now online…only”.
But maybe I’m old fashioned or something.
Yes, if the Reader did that, they’d have an incentive to maintain the server. There’s only one question: Why would they do that? I don’t see that discontinuing newsprint would help the Reader at all, especially considering that they apparantly have a lot more success selling ad space in the paper than on the website (and therefore make more money off of the paper). It wouldn’t matter if straightdope.com got 100% of the Reader’s revenues, if that worked out to be 100% of $0
Plus, the Reader is a free newspaper now. If they made it subscription-based, they would no doubt lose a lot of readers. Besides, not everyone has Internet acces. I’d venture to say especially people who read a weekly free newspaper aren’t particularly interested in an online version.
I’m a bit surprised by your answer. I’ve always considered readers of free weeklies to be bright, intelligent, well-educated individuals. In fact, I’ve always thought of them as a more intelligent crowd than the majority of the people walking down the street. My basis for that belief, up until now, has only been my personal observations of readers of our local free weekly, The Twin Cities Reader.
To support my theory, I was going to check my local’s papers demographics. Instead, I found the information I was looking for at the Chicago Reader information page.
Now I know, a lot can be made by those figures. And I don’t know about you, but those figures tell me that the readers of the Chicago Reader are more likely than most to have and use an internet connection.
All that aside, I think MSK’s idea is kind of goofy.
I suppose that could have been phrased better, yeah. The main gist of it is: it’s a large step from a free newspaper to a paid-for website. No matter what the demographics.
Getting back to the OP: In any case, if the Chicago Reader decided to put more effort for the online version of their publication, the time/money would be spent on the server for http://www.chicagoreader.com , which is not necessarily the same as the server for our message board.
