Thursday, July 8, 2010

What's Time charging for?

It looks like Time is going to be following an idea I have been espousing for some time. A brief quote from a Time spokesman on a blog called "All Things Considered" includes this description of the company's plans: "Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions."

In other words, the free Internet material will be the sort of "news" that can come from anywhere with exclusive material protected for purchase either from print or iPad versions. Of course, comments on the blog ask the usual "Why would I want to pay to get what I can get elsewhere" questions that proliferate among new media devotes, but the Time plan (and others, such as Murdoch's newspapers) isn't offering news you can get elsewhere behind a paywall. It's up to Time and the others to make us want to pay to get it (as we do now for all sorts of material, see my Internet and cable bills for examples).

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