How Cable and Satellite Can Save the Newspaper Business

Here is a hard cold fact of the Internet age. Any content creator whose sole business is selling their content à la carte will have a hard time surviving. In a world of unlimited digital choice, the cost of creating and marketing content that generates a profit is expensive and difficult. Which is exactly why the successful sites have been aggregators.

It’s also exactly why newspapers are having a hard time making it. They sell papers one at a time. They sell home subscriptions one at a time. When they charge for monthly subscriptions online, they sell them one at a time. That’s a tough business.

It’s not that the newspaper content is not worth it. The problem is that it requires prospective buyers to first value the content, then decide whether they want to go through the hassle of going to a newsstand, calling the home delivery department of the paper, or putting in their credit card information to buy online. This may be beyond a solvable problem when much of the same content is available online for free.

So what to do?

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