Newsday and SF Chron Will Start Charging

Alan D. Mutter writes on his blog:

To avoid cutting that deeply into the staff, the Chronicle plans to boost revenues by increasing subscription prices for the newspaper and to begin charging consumers for access to certain features and sections at its website. The site, SFGate.Com, now is entirely free.

And our sister site FishbowlNY reports:

Late Thursday, Tom Zucker, COO of Newsday’s parent company Cablevision said the paper plans “to end the distribution of free Web content.” Zucker declined to specify when when Newsday will begin charging to read content on its site, and did not reveal what that pricing would be.

Here’s the problem with charging for web stuff: All it takes is one site (cough Huffpo) to copy the article and post it in its entirety, link to it so it isn’t technically lifting and the model is sunk.

The viability of this plan rests on web punks not using ctrl c.

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