Here on Long Island, the local newspaper Newsday recently began a policy that if you are not a subscriber to Newsday and are not an Optimum Cable customer of their parent company, Cablevision, you will have to pay $5 per week to access the newspaper's website.
I think this is a case of a dying newspaper (Newsday has been losing readership and subscribers at a steady rate over the last few year) owned by a company that is notorious for jacking up the rates on their cable services because they are the only cable provider on LI, using e-commerce to try to drive business to the brick & mortar side of the business. As there are many things wrong with Newsday and the parent company, I cannot see this being a successful strategy.
But if they were a better run company with better content and a better reputation, does anyone think a policy like this would work?
