Newspapers

Mark Cuban posted an interesting idea for a way to save the newspapers from their slow collapse. The basic premise is that newspaper or for this matter any content provider would close their content to the general public but provide it to anyone who cable or satellite provider subscriber and they would. The cable companies would pay a nominal fee for this exclusive content. Overall, this is an interesting idea but I am not sure if it is really executable especially with the growing ubiquity of open wifi networks. Also, I am not sure if I want to give cable or satellite companies more power as what content they can or will provide. This week On The Media had a 3 good stories directly related to this topic that are definitely worth listening to:

The first is about a micro payment service called Kachingle that is trying to generate revenue for newspapers by having people willingly make a small payment for the content they consume. This sounds interesting but I am not really sure how many people would sign up for such a service or if they did sign up I am not sure how many people would refill their account:

The second story is about how comcast, the nations largest cable company, restricted what some of their subscribers were doing online under the guise of QOS:

And lastly, the third related story is a discussion about the ramifications of the demise of the newspaper industry and if it is worth saving:

Personally, I do think newspapers especially investigative journalism (on all levels local, national, and international) is very important and needs an outlet. It is debatable if newspapers are the appropriate venue for such journalism but that is, in my opinion, the only reason newspapers need to be saved. The biggest problem seems to be that the newspaper industry has been extremely slow to adopt to new technology and make necessary changes and modernizations in printing and distribution models in order to remain efficient and profitable.