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“Therefore, Newsday’s web strategy has two parts: 1) to provide Newsday’s print subscribers with a rich web experience that goes far beyond what they can get in the newspaper alone, thereby motivating them to remain, return, or choose to subscribe to Newsday; and 2) to provide Cablevision’s high-speed Internet customers with reasons to remain with Cablevision, reasons to return to Cablevision, or reasons to choose Cablevision.”

Unfortunately, the memo doesn’t mention their mobile web strategy which happens to be wide open for anyone to visit completing discouraging anyone from ponying up the $5 a week subscription to their full fledged web site.

Along the same line of thought, Newsday is three months into it’s paywall experiment charging $5 a week for access to their website (print subscribers and Cablevision Cable subscribers have free access) and they have 35 paid subscribers. In the three months since starting the experiment Newsday has lost over 50 percent of their web traffic peaking at 1.5 million visits per month in July 2009 down to 460,000 visits in December 2009.

Outside of the fact that it’s not breaking news, the NY Times has decided to try out the middle ground in the payment wall debate, again. Last time with Times Select they hid their “premium” content from those who didn’t want to pay. This time they are going to ask the power users who access their web site more frequently to pay. Unfortunately, they aren’t ready to release simple details about the plan so we really can’t make a judgement call on it.

It would be nice to know how much is frequent? How many article can I access before I have to pay? How much will I have to pay? Then maybe we can make some comparisons to how much they are making on advertising revenue versus how much they will make for charging for access.

You think if they were sending a news alert about charging in 2011, they could have at least gotten the full story from their bosses.

The commission also examined issued the media is facing recommending:

• Direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.
• Increase the role of higher education,community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.

• Paid Subscribers both online and in print – To justify paid content model you must show an increase in print newspaper subscriptions because the reason you switched to a paid model was to stop the cannibalization of your print subscribers by your free online site. Of course most studies show that the revenue generated from paid online subscribers will barely cover the cost of running the website.
• Web Site Visitors – Nope. You can keep measuring your web site visitors if you want to, but the dropoff from when it was free will be so discouraging you might change your mind and open it up again.
• Web Display Ad Revenue – Strike Two. Won’t work. You just killed your audience with the paid wall. Any advertiser who runs on your site behind the pay wall doesn’t know what they’re doing.
• Online Classified Revenue – Strike Three. This isn’t working for many newspapers anymore, but if you’ve killed your audience then who will pay to get their classifieds seen online by nobody.

So, the only real workable metric is an increase in paid print subscribers. That’s right a continual increase. If you only slow your decrease, then you’ve just slowed the print newspaper death spiral and given yourself another year or two until the presses stop running.

The Guardian has an interesting look at this debate  pitting the NY Times Maureen Dowd against Jeff Jarvis examining whether Google is friend or foe.

Dowd says Google has hijacked journalism.  “Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy. Robert Thomson, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, denounced websites like Google as “tapeworms”.”

Jarvis on the other hand has faced the facts. “I had been naively thinking – hoping – that there would be an orderly transfer of power, print to digital, and that many of the incumbents would survive and some might lead the transition. With some exceptions, I no longer believe that.”