Friday, November 06, 2009

Give me paywalls - from the top down

It's nice that some seven-day dailies, which have a fair amount of local news content, are going to paywalls, but really, that's not enough to solve the national issue.

The real problem, though, is lack of leadership by the AP, not individual newspapers. AP ought to put mandatory paywalls, with anti-Reuters/AFP exclusivity, into another revision of new AP contract. Then, it ought to abut quintuple its rates for Google et al, (with similar exclusivity clauses), high enough that Google would have to paywall, too, and couldn't do this on ads alone.

No comments: