Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Why online news is failing

Spotted in a Wall Street Journal article about Patch, AOL's struggling online content venture:

It is tough to sell enough online ads to cover the cost of producing local news, especially while maintaining a local reporting staff and a local advertising sales force.

Patch isn't the first online venture to experience this problem. I've seen references to News Corp. and other media executives talking about the "digital dimes" for ages. It's only going to get worse until someone figures out a viable business model to support human-powered local news-gathering.

And the business model may not even involve ads ...

No comments:

Post a Comment

I will review and approve comments as soon as possible, but spam, personal attacks, and rude messages will be deleted.