Paywalls ComeTo College Newspapers

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By  on PaidContent, Oct. 11, 2011

Students work for their college newspapers for all sorts of reasons—and while college papers are sheltered from the harsh realities facing national and local newspapers in many ways, it’s probably never too early for a crash course in revenue models. Hence the new collaboration between digital subscription company Press+ and the Knight Foundation: Starting today, the first 50 college newspapers to sign up with Press+ will be able to install free meters on their websites, allowing them to collect donations and subscription fees from readers.

Press+, which is owned by RR Donnelley (NSDQ: RRD) and already operates metered paywalls for “grownup” newspapers like the Baltimore Sunand many MediaNews Group and Lee papers, says it is “providing students with a sustainable way to target parents, alumni, and other engaged readers for donations or subscriptions.

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NYT as the comeback kid: 280,000 subscribers for digital NYT

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By Joe Pompeo on Yahoo! News Blog, July 26 – What better way for New York Times executives to celebrate the news that 281,000 subscribers are now paying to read the publication in digital form than with a magazine cover story about the paper of record’s comeback?

A comeback is indeed the premise of Seth Mnookin’s feature in New York Magazine this week.

Remember back in the ’00s, when the Times had lost a fair chunk of its credibility thanks to a former intern who made up stories and a seasoned reporter who believed stories other people made up? When the advent of online news began to suck the life out of the Gray Lady’s business model? When some media watchers thought it plausible that the iconic news outlet might not even exist in another few months?

No more!

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Book Review – Funding Journalism in the Digital Age

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Funding Journalism in the Digital Age: Business Models, Strategies, Issues and Trends. Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. 185 pp.

The traditional business model for daily newspapers is “virtually obsolete,” observe Jeff Kaye and Stephen Quinn from their Anglophile perches, which begs the question of how much longer print journalism can survive.

The 2007-2009 recession brought the first-ever three-year drop in U.S. advertising revenues, leading to the closure of venerable dailies including the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A paid model for online content has proved the elusive Holy Grail of journalism in the digital age, leading to proposals of a number of alternatives to the for-profit model. Funding Journalism in the Digital Age provides both a guide to how the news media got into this mess and a handy compendium of   the recent proposals to resuscitate journalism.

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