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LATimes.com - Missing the Boat? UPDATED 3/12 9:40 a.m.
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3563 Reads
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(UPDATE BELOW to correct an error)
Caryn gripes today at blogging.la that the L.A. Times charges $150 per article for digital reprint rights. How, she wonders, can they get away with that? I'll tell you how, and what I think they should be doing differently:
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You can *link* to LATimes.com stuff all you want (outside of CalendarLive, as explained below), but in the end, the articles only last for seven days, and then they vanish behind a firewall that costs $2.50 a pop to pierce. (You can also pay $149.95 for an annual pass, $14.95 for a monthly pass or $4.95 for a 24-hour pass to make 200, 15 and 4 downloads, respectively)
But if you want to own the rights to reproduce the full text of an article (a few paragraphs without fee is fair use, last I looked) you have to shell out $150 - a fee of the sort the Times has always charged for the dead-tree-reprint rights.
I'll repost here the thoughts I left at blogging.la in response to Caryn's justified complaint.Speaking as a former L.A. Times staff writer/columnist, I can tell you they're doing whatever it takes to protect their shrinking bottom line.
With mindshare being eroded hourly by the Internet, cable, network gaming, magazines and a host of other media, daily newspapers that were already in a death spiral in the late 20th century are now circling the drain at dizzying speed.
What sucks is that they're still (generally) among the most reliable (if slow) news sources out there, they've failed to innovate sufficiently to keep pace (especially LATimes.com, which clings to the visual-train-wreck-for-news-junkies format over a more useful and broadly attractive news/portal/community model) and their audience is dissolving as they watch.
Put in that position and unwilling to make drastic changes, wouldn't you want to charge $150 a pop for digital reprints? That's $150 a year, by the way.
To be fair, Tribune has not been too kind financially to LATimes.com. The site has a staff of about 15, compared with more than 70 at WashingtonPost.com, and it has not undergone a redesign since the makeover more than four years ago by - if memory serves - Frog Design.
(UPDATE - A friend at LATimes.com corrects me that the Frog look-and-feel was done away with 3 years ago)
If the pay-to-click CalendarLive subscription experiment is going well ($4.95 a month or $34.95 a year), it ain't making the trades.
But word has it that the heavily-traveled LATimes.com is the only Trib site running in the black.
If Trib is wise, they'll leverage that profitability and the considerable readymade resources - news, restaurant listings, arts and entertainment listings and the woefully underused message boards - latch onto a few more cheap must-have features, and spend a bit more money to:- turn the site into a modern, useful portal and hub
- add and promote live traffic services (freeway speeds, dynamic point-to-point travel time calculators, etc.)
- put a pennies-per-click charge on the bottom half of all news stories to begin monetizing their news junkie audience
- and then sell "premium" access to just* the listings, tools and community.
They've got value, they just don't know how to sell it, or how broadly they could do so if they imagined a larger audience.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, March 11, 2004 - 01:19 PM
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