David Carr the sad state of the newspaper business and its struggle to figure out the whole Internet Thing in the New York Times, nimbly managing to avoid mentioning TimesSelect even once. But he’s figured out the business model for them:
…everybody knows consumers on the Web do not want to pay for what they can get free, right?
Maybe not. As iTunes has demonstrated, there is a vast swath of consumers who are willing to pay for what they want and avoid the moral taint of unauthorized use.
Egads! The pitch suddenly becomes clear: all that free stuff you’ve been reading online might feel good, but it’s morally tainted. If you want to enjoy your punditry with a clear concience, you’d best be ponying up $49.95, pronto: or expect to be seeing the ink-stained Ghosts of Newsprint Past, Present, and Future showing up by your bedside some dark evening soon.
This of course also suggests another market segment: those who, Hugh Grant-like, will seek out the dark and forbidden thrill of bootleg MoDo columns simply because of the stench of immorality that surrounds them.
Dowd isn’t the real vice, of course: everybody knows that she’s just a gateway to hardcore Krugman use….
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technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.