A copy of the New York Times is wrapped around a dead fish on the cover of Time Magazine's Feb. 18 edition. Inside is an article by former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson, suggesting that micropayments for content might be the way to save journalism in the world of the Internet.
Fewer people are reading newspapers in print than ever. Those trends are most obvious in those large publications like the Times whose daily circulation dropped 3.6 percent last years.
Isaacson points out that while the number of people reading the paper in print has dropped off, the number of people who get their news from a newspaper Web site has increased substantially.
The Record-Courier's Web site received about 3,000 visits a day during the week, that's slightly higher than to our print circulation. If we charged a dime to read our stories, as Isaacson suggests, that would be about $2,000 a week, assuming some of our readers didn't go elsewhere.
Isaacson comes from a very different tradition than most of the newspapers in the country. In his world, subscriptions and newsstand sales are a significant part of a newspaper's revenue.
That's true for many of the metropolitan dailies. But for the vast majority of small daily and weekly newspapers, subscriptions and rack sales barely cover the cost of delivery. We and our smaller brethren rely solely on advertising and have since our founding.
We're used to swimming rough waters. All we ask is that our readers support our advertisers, and that our advertisers recognize the value of access to our readers.
