Two responses to this:
They found a big old traveling case full of cash that Hearst’s mom left behind.
Now we know when someone says, “But the New York Times does it.” that it isn’t sufficient justification.
Some people like to get their news from a single source each day-- and they read that source in depth. Others read whatever’s available. Paywalls penalize the former-- the regular reader.
I’ve noticed that because I subscribe to a source, I tend to read it to the exclusion of other sources. Then again, I used to read the Sunday papers for hours.
The Chronicle had a bad monetization model. I’d never pay to read the Chronicle, but I’d certainly pay a yearly fee to have all of its content blocked. I’d even pay to block just the comments section, which, I’m sure, is even now blaming the entire fiasco on “the illegals”.
The Internet is loaded with free and interesting user generated content. People who used to read newspapers for something to do, don’t have to do that now.
I might pay to have the daily mail blocked. Perhaps a plugin that suppresses daily mail urls.
They could seriously save everyone a lot of time and just allow posters to login with their Stormfront accounts.
It’s really a shame a city like San Francisco is stuck with such a crap news site. It’s laughable that uber-high-tech-startup-disruption SF has a daily paper site straight out of 2002. I picture the staff as the Baron’s inventors in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
If they would do us a favor and keep their Token Conservative Female behind the paywall. She’s almost as bad as the virulently Islamophobic Post 9/11 Seekurity Mom who hung on there for a while.
Kitten Block for Firefox has you covered. (I’m not affiliated. It just amuses me deeply.)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kitten-block/
Paywall up, paywall down. Paywall up, paywall down. These are just more convulsions of the dying newspaper industry.
The Internet comet crashed to earth in 1998 and killed the newspaper dinosaurs, who existed solely because they could create monopoly conditions for local advertising. The newspapers were killed by the digital revolution with the formation of craigslist, ebay, google, and amazon all around 1998, thus destroying the local advertising monopolies, but their deaths have taken over a decade to register with their pea-sized brains as their mammoth bodies thrashed about.
Going digital ten years too late means that newspapers have merely become little more than a few additional websites competing with a billion existing web sites for limited advertising dollars. And even worse for the dying papers, ad pages no long bring in thousands of dollars per page, but instead bring in thousandths of a cent per page, so there’s no chance whatsoever of digital ad revenues ever equaling newspaper publishing ad revenues.
Digital subscriptions, also known as paywalls, never had a chance of working either. Most of what’s behind a paywall is freely available elsewhere, and paywalls render any ads behind the paywalls valueless, meaning no one in their right mind is going to pay for an ad behind a paywall.
It is true that the loss of news gathering by newspapers is collateral damage from the digital revolution. However, news was never anything more than the hook to get consumers to buy and read the newspaper ads, and for the most part had been turned into little more than leftest propaganda anyway, so the value of the “loss” is highly debatable.
At any rate, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch, since most newspapers have been promoting the overthrow of all that is good and unique about the U.S. for at least 70 years. At least buggy whip makers never tried to destroy the U.S.
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