Wired: Ad-funded Guardian could switch off presses by 2015
There’s a lot more to admire about the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, than most newspaper chiefs. But there’s one thing I keep hearing again and again from the traditional media, and it’s on the feasibility of paywalls. There are many cases of proven success with paywall strategies online. The question is not whether or not paywalls work, because they do–it’s whether a publisher can come up with an implementation that works.
He sounded like a man who fears being torn between necessity and idealism. Making online journalism pay its way is the necessary bit (and this, of course, might mean charging for content in the end). It would be “crazy to be fundamentalist” about paywalls, Rusbridger suggested, “because none of us knows [whether they will work]“
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