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10ecn Paywall


Nathan_in_DC

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Anyone else supremely annoyed by this? More effective advertising and marketing, better writing and reporting, and instituting policies that make you pay for certain articles or for archives is how you get ahead in the news world today, not setting up an all-or-nothing paywall after a few articles.

Not only will those who want to get around it be able to get around without paying, it'll just drive people to the plethora of other sites where people can get their news. Maybe this shouldn't annoy me as much as it does, but if the Tennessean is having problems paying the bills, maybe it needs to do a little navel gazing instead of trying to do something that will just drive off customers in the long run.

Or maybe I'm completely wrong...

(Rant mode off.)

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This drive me nuts. It would be different if the Tennessean had unique content, but they dont. They need to follow the model of the City Paper. The news the Tennessean has can be found most of the time somewhere else.

I remember when I was a kid we used to get Sunday delivery of the Tennessean. About 7 or 8 years ago my parents just ended up cancelling their subscription. Not because they didn't want to get a newspaper, but because the quality of the paper had just gone so far down hill that they no longer thought it worth paying for. I'm sure that was a scenario that's been replayed in thousands of households across Middle Tennessee too.

Newspapers have it rough now, there's no denying that. But they can still thrive if they step up their game to the competition. I feel like they became complacent after the downfall of the Banner (maybe well before that even) since their only competition for years were local papers and national sources like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But now, with competition from the local TV stations' news sites, the City Paper, the Post and the Business Journal, they're suddenly in a position where they have actual competition. There have been plenty of newspapers that have managed to survive the shift to online distribution by streamlining their services and improving marketing and reporting. Even though it may be a rough patch, the newspaper isn't dead, far from it in my opinion. But the Tennessean will be if they don't get their act together. I really hope they do manage to figure out the current environment, losing the city's oldest paper would be a tragedy, and an avoidable one at that.

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Guys just download a mozilla or chrome browser (any secondary browser) and clear the cache and close the browser. When you reopen you will be granted another 30-day viewing opportunity. Or you can cleat your existing cace/history/cookies from your primary browser but that is more of a hassle.

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Guys just download a mozilla or chrome browser (any secondary browser) and clear the cache and close the browser. When you reopen you will be granted another 30-day viewing opportunity. Or you can cleat your existing cace/history/cookies from your primary browser but that is more of a hassle.

Exactly what I've been doing. :)

Which means that instead of going by IP visits, they're doing cookies, which just seems somewhat incompetent on their part. Unless it was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink to allow people to continue to access it for free.

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  • 3 months later...

I remember when I was a kid we used to get Sunday delivery of the Tennessean. About 7 or 8 years ago my parents just ended up cancelling their subscription. Not because they didn't want to get a newspaper, but because the quality of the paper had just gone so far down hill that they no longer thought it worth paying for. I'm sure that was a scenario that's been replayed in thousands of households across Middle Tennessee too.

Newspapers have it rough now, there's no denying that. But they can still thrive if they step up their game to the competition. I feel like they became complacent after the downfall of the Banner (maybe well before that even) since their only competition for years were local papers and national sources like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But now, with competition from the local TV stations' news sites, the City Paper, the Post and the Business Journal, they're suddenly in a position where they have actual competition. There have been plenty of newspapers that have managed to survive the shift to online distribution by streamlining their services and improving marketing and reporting. Even though it may be a rough patch, the newspaper isn't dead, far from it in my opinion. But the Tennessean will be if they don't get their act together. I really hope they do manage to figure out the current environment, losing the city's oldest paper would be a tragedy, and an avoidable one at that.

I agree, newspapers are not dead. Not many will keep printing 7 days a week, but that's a different conversation.

 

There are a lot of good people over at the Tennessean doing the best they can. To the extent that the newspaper has failed to live up to its obligation to produce original, meaningful and probing content, the blame lies partly with Gannett leadership but more broadly with an outdated business model. You can't make enough money from owning a bunch of newspapers (plus TV stations or whatever) to satisfy shareholders anymore. We've seen that play out with every major media company in America over the past 10 years. The labor and production costs keep growing, and the revenue keeps shrinking.

 

There are two scenarios that I hope to see within the next 10 years:

 

1. The big dogs like Gannett either sell off their print assets or slide into insolvency. That way, local investors can either buy their old newspapers or start new ones. I firmly believe local ownership is essential to good local journalism. Journalists like to proclaim their civic duty, and that's a praiseworthy thing, but at the end of the day, the Tennessean is accountable to Gannett, which is accountable to its shareholders. Now the CP is locally owned, but it has yet to reach its potential as a major civic asset.

 

and/or

 

2. Nonprofit local journalism emerges in a big way. Sort of like ProPublica, but on a widespread local level. It would take a lot of work to raise funds, but newspapers already put a lot of work into selling ads. You could funnel everything into a blind trust type of vehicle and make it totally clear that donations in no way buy coverage or influence. You could get seed money from a family like the Ingrams or Frists or some big-money foundations and just run the thing off the income, adding staff as the income increased. It would be the exact opposite of what's happening now, financially speaking, where you have media companies slashing payrolls as profits fall.

 

But It may be that the big guys can sputter along with thinner and thinner profit margins for years, clutching onto their many mediocre papers and losing readers by the thousands. Gannett has certainly shown that you can cut your way to a profit; we just haven't seen how long they can keep it up. I sure hope that doesn't happen, but if it does, it just makes it that much easier to run them out of business with a well-produced enterprise.

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