Aram Zucker-Scharff

Newsweek relaunched its print edition with a whole new calculation for what a print news product should be. 

Most news organizations that have made the jump to digital are treating their print editions as a low-price add-on to digital subscriptions. The Wall Street Journal charges $22.99/mo for digital, $26.99/mo for print. NYT charges $25ish/mo for print and web, $15 for the digital alone. The largest newspapers in the nation consider their print editions to be worth $4 and $10 respectively, significantly less than their digital access. 

On the magazine side the all-digital or or print-only editions of The New Yorker are priced the same, $59.99 a year, or ~$5/mo. Combine the two? It only costs an additional $10/year. Someone’s value is significantly less in that equation.

The Atlantic’s internal pricing logic is harder to determine. There is the $2.20/mo monthly digital edition and the $2.99/mo weekly edition subscription. The print edition (which comes with full access to the first digital edition) is apparently $24.50 a year, or $2.04/mo. Which means it is actually cheaper to buy the print edition of The Atlantic if all you want is the digital edition, even though the cost of printing the magazine must be far higher than pushing the digital file. The logic here is strange, but the implication has to be that we (the readership) are not expected to monetarily value printed works. 

The Newsweek calculation has a priced wall for web access and a far more pricey one for print. $12.50/mo for Print+Digital vs $3.33/mo for digital only. (These are their launch prices, the costs are likely to go up after the first year.) The math is the opposite of everyone else’s. Instead, the print edition is the most expensive part of the equation.

The play here then is straightforward: Newsweek is print as a luxury product. Is this a model that will work? Do we consider our dead-paper copies a premium these days? That’s something Newsweek’s numbers will bear out.

If they do, it could mean a whole new way to think about pricing journalism products.

Then, there’s a question that this doesn’t ask: Should print journalism be a luxury product? Does making it one somehow compromise the ethics of what journalism is supposed to be for? That question may be harder to answer.

Check Nieman Lab for more on Newsweek’s pricey relaunch. 

The Washington Post To Create WPNYC, a New York-Based Design and Development Office:

The Washington Post is building a NYC-based Tech/Design unit. Why? No apparent good reason. 

Speculation: Either they’re planning on expanding their Markets/Business (difficult) or NYC (near-impossible) coverage or they’re planning to roll out web- or mobile-based tools as stand-alone products (or a product line) and are finding the ‘start-up community’ insufficient in the DC area to support, staff and publicize such an endeavor.

There is an additional alternative, but one I think truly unlikely, that they simply can’t find the quantity and quality of tech/design staff they need in the DC Metro Area. By my knowledge, this is impossible. The people are all there, the only difference I can think of is that tech people get paid less in NYC than DC, and that’s why I’m maintaining this as a remote possibility. 

WaPo has been increasingly becoming a local paper and political focus-publication. There’s unlikely to be a space in the market or industry for it to turn that around. So what’s the reasoning behind this?

NOTE: They aren’t moving into a new office, apparently they still are in the Slate office, thus this makes a whole lot more sense. Via.

EDIT: I’d forgotten that Trove is not part of the Bezos owned WaPo.

CFOPublishing/response-stack:

response-stack – Response Stack – A tool for making stories out of your comments

I’m releasing a new WordPress plugin today that allows you to use shortcodes to embed comments and comment threads into the body of stories.

It’s called Response Stack.

The goal is to build stories out of comments and help both the original story and the discussion around it live on.

Read more about why we built it and how it works on my blog: Response Stack: build stories out of reader comments.

I’m releasing a new WordPress plugin today that allows you to use shortcodes to embed comments and comment threads into the body of stories. It’s called Response Stack. The goal is to build stories out of comments and help both the original story and the discussion around it live on. You can see the first […]