Dear Financial Press,
Please reconsider your archaic paywall policies in favour of a more modern, enlightened, and - dare I suggest - more profitable paradigm. I refer you to Doc Searls:
So here’s a challenge to the daily papers: stop giving away the franchise. Make daily editorial available online only for subscribers. Charge for the fresh stuff, online as well as off.
But give away what’s stale. Free the fishwrap.
There is lots of advertising money to be gathered just by opening the archives, linking to them, letting Google’s spiders index them, and watching as the AdSense ads start appearing on them and bringing in money from click-throughs. Most papers have enormous archives that, once exposed, will vastly raise their profiles on Google and other search engines. There’s lots of good will to be had as well, from everybody who ever wants to know anything about a town or a city that only newspapers have kept up with, for decades. I can’t think of a better way for a paper to expose vast legacy advantages than by opening its archives.
Your value lies in your reputation and ubiquity within the community. Now I’m not suggesting that this will disappear overnight, inertia is your friend (for now), but sooner or later your walled fortress mentality will cut you off from a real-time interconnected world of digital information. Because it is impossible to search and link to your archives (dynamically, automatically, algorithmically) they will lose their value. Become irrelevant.
I doubt however that the markets will allow truly valuable financial newspapers to continue on their current path of slow suicide. If current management persists, I’m sure there will be (private?) capital available to sweep up these tarnished assets and transform them into successful digital age enterprises.
