The former managing editor of Time magazine, Walter Isaacson, has appeared on The Daily Show to discuss his article on “how to save your newspaper” – in which he concedes that publishers made mistakes in the early days of the web, and explores whether an iTunes-like micropayment approach to online content might work.
“We made a mistake. I was there back in the early Nineties when we started putting everything on the net. We probably should have said it shouldn’t be just ad-supported.”
From Isaacson’s piece in Time:
“This is not a business model that makes sense. When web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings.”
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