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Comment by volaski | Hacker News Reader

First of all, NYT has over million paid online subscribers. It's not like NOBODY wants to pay for NYT. Second, I think it's short sighted to say "They should build something people would want to pay for". It's like going back in time when Facebook was just getting started, or Google was getting started, and telling them "You should build a product that users will pay for". Here's what I think: "enhanced tools for journalists", "summarization and synthesis", "adaptive content", all of them will contribute to create value. When there's more value, there will be many ways to translate that into revenue. The reason newspapers are in danger is NOT because they are not monetizing enough. It's because they are not providing as significant value as they used to in their good old days.

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I agree that the NYT is in a better position than most papers, but the reality is advertisers would rather put their spend into Facebook or something like Buzzfeed which get have a much larger audience and way more page views than the New York Times. Not only that, the tools are self-serve and the interactions they get are much more clear.

The New York Times is already a large corporation, with lots of employees, and tied to revenue streams from advertisers that are waning. I don't seehow it's like going back to Facebook or Google in that regard, because their head counts were minuscule.

You say media companies should figure out the right business model but you yourself seem to be stuck thinking inside the old business model box. In the short term it is true all the new media sites seem to be crushing it with all the eyeballs they have since the dominant revenue model for our age is advertising, but things always change. Even this online ad model was laughed at a decade ago. And it is increasingly becoming less lucrative as more and more people can publish stuff online. The only way to ensure you survive is to make sure you create a unique value. And page view is not one of them.

I started Beacon which funds journalism online (http://beaconreader.com) — definitely don't fit into the old business model, but that's the game they are playing.

Impressive work on Beacon. Definitely not "old business model" :)

That said I think you're undervaluing the potential of the OP. You say at [1] that one of the key things you've learned is that readers fund journalism because they care about having an impact. If successful, the approaches they're discussing could significantly increase the impact of journalists' work -- reusing the same Particles in different contexts, being able to provide multiple tailored versions of the same post that could resonate with different audiences, etc. And it also may point to ways for publishers to participate in and leverage the Buzzfeed/Facebook ecosystems while still providing additional value on their own sites/apps/publications.

So, agreed that it by itself isn't a business model solution, but don't write it off so quickly ...

[1] https://www.beaconreader.com/blog/beacon-immigration-3-milli...

Maybe, but maybe lots of solutions like this already exist! Tweets, genius for annotations, facebook, youtube... I agree certain backers might care more about having an article published in x ways, but I think they are overestimating their usefulness and things like tweet embeds, youtube embeds, or using phantom js to render custom twitter cards with text PLUS the full length article do the same job more or less.

Where I am, we have several local newspapers that got rid of ads completely except for small listings for like 50€ each "XYZ died" or "Selling ABC".

And it still works.

People are willing to pay enough for quality content or content about local news that it works.

Maybe they need to shave off a couple ad employees.

I think it's both. They aren't monetizing enough because it's impossible to provide the same value when the same topic can be googled or read in a tweet in a matter of seconds.

Really these guys are trying to save a sinking ship.

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