Just to check - the only real link to baseball for this one is the owner, right?

1 - Yes although it is obviously significant from the standpoint of getting a sense of the direction of media.

More interestingly, this is the headline on the website right now;

"What LIers want to hear in Obama's address"

I realize that "LIers" means people from Long Island but I don't know that I'd want to put it out there that way.

The (New York-based) Dolans don't own a baseball team, praise the Lord. So, not even that :)

Newsday's Ken Davidoff is a terrific baseball writer, though.

The actual paper is $4/week, BTW, so the online site is more expensive. (And, unless you are very committed to a paper-free lifestyle, completely nonsensical to purchase, since the online subscription comes with the paper.)

I think that it's hilariously lame to think that people are going to base their choice of cable/Internet/phone provider on access to one particular news site. But even if one accepts that premise for argument's sake, I still don't see why they needed to offer an outrageously priced non-subscriber option at all. Doing so was basically asking for this story to be written.

I think just to mix things up, the Dolans should trade Newsday to the Wilpons for the Mets. I don't expect either one will be better run, but it would at least be entertaining.

The headline and the excerpt, hilarious as they are, obscure a somewhat important fact:

Of course, there are a few caveats. Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.

So a substantial majority of the target audience for Newsday.com is already getting it for free, though I suppose they have to go through a few annoying registration procedures first. (That's probably why the traffic is down so much.)

Wow, that is a ridiculous price.

I would be willing to bet that if Jim Furtado charged the same price for access to BTF, he would get more subscribers than Newsday.

Doing so was basically asking for this story to be written.

The Dolans don't care, they're pigs.
They've have never shown any concern for bad press
They have never shown any concern for their customers

I was once told by a guy I knew who worked for a Cable Industry trade group in the 90s, that they had a special group tasked for "Dolan Control" - the Dolans were inevitably so greedy and short sighted the rest of the industry was always worried that the Dolans would bring unwanted regulation (or deregulation as the case may be) down on them.

If you got into cable at the right time, established your local monopoly and stayed in- it was impossible to lose money, it was a license to print money- all those guys got rich,

senior Dolan had some good ideas back in the day (which generally really took off after he sold them off to others) Junior Dolan on the other hand has no good ideas, and everything he touches turns to crap, the only Cable "familY" greedier and more short-sighted than the Dolans were the Rigas family.

Whenever their is content blackout it almost always seems to involve Cablevision, witness the latest fight with the FoodNetwork

In the past content providers had to deal with local cable monopolies, now the cable companies are getting competition from satellite and phone service companies, the content providers are now asking for a [bigger] share of subscriber money, most cable companies are negotiating, the Dolans OTOH freaked out, "NO IT's our money hands off"

It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more content provider agreements expire and they ALL ask for $, the days local cable companies could simply print money are over, I give it 5 years, 7 tops before either the Dolans are forced out or Cablevision goes under

So a substantial majority of the target audience for Newsday.com is already getting it for free, though I suppose they have to go through a few annoying registration procedures first. (That's probably why the traffic is down so much.)

Yes. Is the paper subscription substantially more than $5 per week?

Why would anyone subscribe to the web-site alone, if for a few dollars more you can get the physical paper and the website?

Why would anyone subscribe to the web-site alone, if for a few dollars more you can get the physical paper and the website?

It's possible that these subscribers are in an area that doesn't allow for home delivery. That, or they're idiots.

Is the paper subscription substantially more than $5 per week?

As stated above, it's cheaper ;)

Why would anyone subscribe to the web-site alone, if for a few dollars more you can get the physical paper and the website?

It looks to me like you can get both paper and website for one dollar per week LESS than just the website.


IOW, the paper is worth, according to their own math, -1 dollars per week.

JJunior Dolan on the other hand has no good ideas, and everything he touches turns to crap

Which apparently qualified him to run the Knicks.

The Dolans don't care, they're pigs.
They've have never shown any concern for bad press
They have never shown any concern for their customers

The Dolans may not be bad, but they are not the worst either. THat would be the Philadelphia cable system, Comcast, which is usually ranked among the worst for customer service. All cable companies are ranked low in customer service as they are monopolies.

All cable companies are ranked low in customer service as they are monopolies.

Except for the satellite providers, but the cable companies have been good at lobbying local governments to hit the satellite providers with special fees and taxes.

It's possible that these subscribers are in an area that doesn't allow for home delivery. That, or they're idiots.

This is it. This is for Long Island expats. When I started college, my parents got me a subscription to our local paper for the first semester, which I got in the mail 2-3 days after they were published (we cancelled it as soon as those Gannett goons bought and gutted the local content).

Why would anyone subscribe to the web-site alone, if for a few dollars more you can get the physical paper and the website?

It's possible that these subscribers are in an area that doesn't allow for home delivery. That, or they're idiots.

SoSH has it right. This is for Gisland expats only, since there's nothing non-local on the Newsday website that you can't get in a million other places.

This is for Long Island expats

Of whom I am one, and I'd pay about $1 a week never to have to see Newsday again.

No, that was a cheap shot. Newsday is fine. The thing is, by sealing off your newspaper from the outside world you reduce its profile enormously. The whole flipping point of the WWW, it seems to me, was to make the world less sealed-off. The newspapers I have bookmarked, for instance, are the NYT, the Christian Science Monitor, the SF Chronicle, the Berliner Morgenpost, the Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Le Monde, Le Figaro, El Pais, and the Guardian - and the Financial Times, at least for the crossword puzzle. And these papers have had different approaches to pay-per-view over the years. El Pais shut itself off à la Newsday a few years back. That must have been a bad idea, because they went back to a free model pretty quickly (and it's a very good site, too).

So what Newsday is telling some kid in Malaysia who wants to learn to read English and dreams of going to grad school at Stony Brook is "we don't care about you, we're pulling up the bridges because we don't want an audience off the island," which is, I think, just going to accelerate their spiral into irrelevance.

If I know anything about these kinds of things, and I do know a little, I'd bet that most of the people who have subscriptions are people affiliated with the paper itself - owners, family members, etc.

Newsday is fine. The thing is, by sealing off your newspaper from the outside world you reduce its profile enormously. The whole flipping point of the WWW, it seems to me, was to make the world less sealed-off. The newspapers I have bookmarked, for instance, are the NYT, the Christian Science Monitor, the SF Chronicle, the Berliner Morgenpost, the Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Le Monde, Le Figaro, El Pais, and the Guardian - and the Financial Times, at least for the crossword puzzle. And these papers have had different approaches to pay-per-view over the years. El Pais shut itself off à la Newsday a few years back. That must have been a bad idea, because they went back to a free model pretty quickly (and it's a very good site, too).

But the problem with Newsday is that it isn't "fine." Meaning that unlike most of the papers you mentioned, it doesn't really have anything unique to offer that anyone outside of Long Island would have any reason to care about. From that perspective, the real problem with charging for web access is that you're losing all those page hits without getting anything in return.

A handful of world class papers might be able to charge for non-print subscriber web access and get away with it, because they offer the sort of reporting that's not available elsewhere on the web without going through a fair amount of work. But Newsday isn't one of those papers, and that's why this move of theirs smacks of desperation more than rational calculation.

Comparatively, I'm curious how catastrophic Newsday's circulation figures for the past 6 months or so are. Have they held average standard to the industry-wide immolation, or are they even worse?

This is for Long Island expats

Well, apparently not a whole helluva lot of people ever leave LI, huh, if there's only 35 of 'em? ;)

But moreover, everyone who has Cablevision gets the Newsday access "perk". So that means folks in the Bronx; Brooklyn; Long Island and other suburbs of NYC within NY State; New Jersey; Connecticut; and eastern Pennsylvania. Given that, does it really make sense to cater Newsday to Long Island?

I realize that "get really local" seems to be the all-purpose advice given to any newspaper these days, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to plug it in here.

Ultimately, if you do need to throw something in to entice people to use your cable/Internet/phone service... and again, I highly doubt it makes any difference... but if you do, then why not just give away a toaster or something ;) Why run a newspaper for that purpose, at all? Much less one that's localized towards a particular, relatively small section of your audience...

It's possible that these subscribers are in an area that doesn't allow for home delivery. That, or they're idiots.

So get your paper delivered to an empty lot on LI and enjoy the web-access for $1 less per week.

Well, apparently not a whole helluva lot of people ever leave LI, huh, if there's only 35 of 'em? ;)

You try fighting traffic on the LIE.

The Newsday pay wall has absolutely nothing to do with print media in the Internet age or anything of the sort. The goal was not to get subscribers. Disagree with the reasoning behind the pay wall, but to cite issues like those is to completely miss the point of the strategy behind the pay wall.

Cablevision added a pay wall to Newsday.com to make the site one of many value-added enhancements for customers of Cablevision Internet service. There are other things which have been done along this line — WiFi hotspots around Long Island, a cable channel focusing on local high school and college sports, other Long Island-focused Web site, etc. — and they are all designed to maintain cable-based revenues.

Why would they do that? Well, for perspective, one month of cable-derived revenues at Cablevision (Internet service, VoIP, and cable TV) is equivalent to 17 months of Newsday revenue. The goal, then, is to use Newsday.com as one of a number of value-added enhancements to A) prevent customer churn mostly at the hands of Verizon FiOS, and B) to possible lure customers who are enticed by these extra offerings or sway those people who are signing up for Internet service for the first time in the Cablevision market.

For a broad view of the pay wall, read Ken Davidoff's final piece before the pay wall was erected. For a micro view, see my own piece on the subject.

The San Francisco Chronicle has taken on a different model. Rather than charge for access to the Internet site, they are delaying online publication of some of their unique enterprise stories and some of their popular columnists as a way of trying to force readers back to subscribing to the print edition. For instance, the Sunday front page stuff and a few columnists are not available online until the following Tuesday.

In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall.

IF newspapers would have just stuck to their guns and implemented a pay wall say 10 years ago, people would be ok paying a small (50-60% of the cost of the paper) fee to view the content. You can't give someone free content for the better part of the decade, and then up and start charging them for it. They'll find their news from another source, or from a source that scrapes your site.

Most porn sites cost less than $5/week, and they're providing a necessity. Newsday really needs to rethink this whole thing, or at least hire Alexis Texas as a beat reporter.

Cablevision's strategy for the pay wall is no different than their strategy has been for News 12 Long Island for many years. The high cost of the web subscription is meant to limit traffic from outside the LI/NY area. I don't know what that bandwidth costs, but it's more than zero, which is what Newsday gets from advertisers for those page views.

The San Francisco Chronicle has taken on a different model.
Not a bad strategy, imo. I know that similar ones wrt book publishing lead me to occasionally buy directly from the seller rather than wait for the Amazons of the world to discount (Baseball America, in particular).

I can't imagine going through the trouble of logging in my credit card number for 25 cents per day to read the few KC Star articles that aren't AP wire stories, particularly when JoPo does his best pieces on his blog.

hire Alexis Texas as a beat reporter.

Reports are in that Alexis Texas has caused a lot of beating.

God I love that ass.