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Websites that are attached
to a legacy newspaper have an
important extra wrinkle to consider. Print advertising rates are still considerably higher than online advertising rates, so any time a paid subscriber to your print publication becomes a free reader of your website you lose money. Not because you lose the subscription fees but because you lose the advertising dollars associated with print. That dynamic has pushed more papers into a paywall strategy, a strategy that makes some sense and seems to be succeeded for several papers. Still you do have to wonder about its long-term viability as an approach to national news. After all, there's lots of great coverage of national politics out there. If you take any given news outlet in the country—even the very best one—and imagine being prohibited from ever reading its national politics coverage again, you'd still find yourself to be a pretty well-informed person. It's a very competitive marketplace. What's more, when someone does break a huge original scoop they're faced with the problem that you can't copyright the facts. Once someone breaks a story about the National Security Agency, other publications pick up the factual content of those stories and can leave you well-informed without ever having read the original story.
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