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The Media Oxpecker: Notes From Beyond the Paywall

Every Friday we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed while you were busy having sex with Rick Perry.

Quick hits!

  • Why would anyone pay to read The New York Times online when its paywall is so easy to get around?

    It turns out people will pay for things even when payment is not required. Motivations such as convenience, duty or appreciation are more compelling than coercion.

    This is especially important when talking about intangible goods, like information.

  • But exactly how much are people now willing to pay for news content?

  • MediaNews Group, which publishes 57 daily newspapers, unveiled a new online paywall model for 23 of its smaller newspaper websites.

  • The National Journal is swapping subscriptions for a membership model.

  • Why some digital news startups — including the Jersey City Independent, co-published by former AAN editor Jon Whiten — are branching into print.

  • Patch costs AOL about $150,000 per site, $160 million a year

  • Now that we have the facts, are there any Groupon bulls left? The answer is a qualified “yes.”

  • News sites shouldn’t assume that Facebook on its own will solve their commenting problems. Users can and will still be anonymous hateful trolls.

  • Designers didn’t appreciate it when the Huffington Post asked them to design a new politics logo for free.

  • Is it ever acceptable to request an interview over Twitter?

  • Newspapers that know their community and readers aren’t failing.

  • And! This essay, um, sort of almost makes some actually interesting arguments about the way we write now?