You aren’t as unique as you think you are

Steve Yelvington, whose brilliance and common sense I am only just beginning to comprehend, provides us with yet another excellent post on some of the realities facing newspapers on the Web. You might remember the last post I bookmarked, in which Yelvington provides some insight on the three primary roles a local news Web site should play (town square, town crier and town expert).

This time, he's talking about the barriers between local newspaper Web site and profitability. I'll let you read his post in detail, but I wanted to paste one of my favorite points:

Local sites don't have the breadth of content to simultaneously support a paid premium content model, while maintaining enough free pages to harvest the advertising benefits of the open model.

One of the ideas that's appealed to me lately is that you should charge for some content via subscriptions and let some other content roam free, subsidized with ad revenue. Yelvington rationally points out that, though it's a workable idea, most local sites don't have enough variety of content to make it work.

He also points out that every one of his barriers is surmountable. I just wonder how. Anyway, read him, bookmark him, get his RSS feed. It's good stuff.

Related posts:

1. The 24/7 newsroom in a small city
2. Will large-scale aggregation erase newspaper brands?
3. Paid journalism’s motto: If you’re good at something, never do it for free
4. You can’t undercut ‘free’
5. Roll my own news site