Let’s Follow the Newport Model!

Newsweek delivers an interesting lesson in media economics via a story on Newport Daily News (R.I.). Here's a paper that constructed a huge pay wall for its online content in hopes of stopping its freefall. That's basically what Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi advocated in a recent, controversial piece in American Journalism Review.

The newspaper began charging $345 for an online subscription, and the impact has been stark: Discontinue-my-subscription calls stopped; newsstand sales of the paper surged by 200 copies a day for a paper with a daily circ. of 13,000.

Woohoo, good news for the industry???!!!

But hold on—what do you do if your newspaper has always been free
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