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News may be a commodity, but quality isn't.

I'd pay $6.99/month to access all NYTimes content online, if not paying meant not being able to get beyond the first page of any story over 24hrs old.

That said, NPR might be the only brand able to compete for my attention online, if they really put muscle into web content and develop "print" talent to rival the likes of the Times.

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Exactly, and there are a good 50-100 thousand of folks like you. Er, maybe total in the world. Now will that pay the infrastructure and salaries of the business like the Times? But that's probably true for only one newspaper, will you also pay $6.99 to the Seattle PI, Dallas News, Minnesota Star Tribune? Perhaps the news industry is at the moment of metamorphosis just before it becomes a beautiful online butterfly, it'll be incredible after the transition but it's very vulnerable in the pupa stage...

Your numbers are a bit off. New York Times circulation:

1,039,031 Daily

1,451,233 Sunday

Don't both of those cost much more than $6.99/mo?

A lot of the value of a newspaper is the physical manifestation of it. If you're in front of a computer there are many other sources that are free, whereas if you have a paper you can easily read it away from a machine, and people understand the costs involved in manufacturing/delivering it.

I think paywalls will exist for content that provides value or that one is assumed to read, but for general news it probably won't work.

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