News business

From the NY Times op-ed page:

News You Can Endow

There is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities.

They appear to have the nonprofit aspect down pretty good already. But the interesting part is they would operate tax free while demanding ever higher taxes on the rest of us.

Would he offer the same deal to Bloggers. No way, the internet is the "cesspool" of misinformation according to a quote he embraces. That is pretty funny considering almost any factual error or arguable statement in a blog seems to get instant feedback demanding correction.

I don't pretend to have the business model for the survival of the news media. I have been blogging long enough to know that they want make any money doing that either. It is important that they find a way to survive, but doing as a endowment will not work.

As left wing as most colleges are they cannot be explicit in their endorsement of left wing political issues as a paper can without losing their tax exemption. Would the Times want the IRS looking overseeing it editorial page?

Delivering news on the internet exclusively does lower circulation and production costs. Specialty media like Politico appear to have found a way to make money doing that. The Christian Science Monitor has recently switched to publishing only on the web. What appears to be missing for the papers is a sense of value by advertisers who can set up their own web ads. Being a source of referrals to those sites should be of great value, but so far, they have not been able to tap it.

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