There’s a lot of talk of paid content saving our beloved newspapers. In a response to Rodricks in Splice Today, Tim Windsor, of all people, states the obvious, most cogent argument for any publication without a national following like the NYT, WSJ etc.

timwindsor
MAY 05, 2009, 07:30PM
There are a lot of reasons to love Rodricks, especially when he’s wearing his Chronicler of Baltimore hat, whether for The Sun, on the radio or, my favorite, during the Rodricks for Breakfast years. But Dan’s wrong about online. The Sun’s online operation does make money – lots of it. But it does not make enough money to support the newsroom of 1995 or even 2005. Thus the cutbacks as the print side revenues cratered over recent years. And as for that wishful anti-trust thinking (how a journalist misses the irony in openly wishing for the kind of collusion that would feed a hundred columns if it happened in any other business is beyond me), that’s just not going to happen. Because if it did, WBAL and WJZ and WYPR and companies that don’t even exist yet would flood into the vacuum left by The Sun’s withdrawal from the internet. And, with its readership reduced by 80-90%, and online revenues collapsed by the move, The Sun and other papers would only be able to wonder who had THAT brilliant idea. But Dan is right — the business model is broken and needs fixing. Local papers still have enormous opportunity — more than any other local company — to bring people together around news and information, and to find ways to sell that attention and that community to the advertisers who need to reach them. Local, connected voices like his are a big part of the puzzle’s solution.