Wednesday, May 14, 2008

More Content Online than Hardcopy? Depends on Where You Are

A reminder: I'm now augmenting the daily column with one-liners available only on the Sun-Times' Web site. Go to suntimes.com and click on my column to learn how you can sign up for text-message updates.
—footnote in Richard Roeper column, Chicago Sun-Times, 2008 May 12

Very casually, one of my favorite columnists is reminding me that in this neck of the MSM woods, I can now get more information from the non-subscription web version than the pay-to-read hardcopy version. Maybe they should just sell the classified ads.

I don’t think that it’s just the Sun-Times either. But the picture is very different in Japan, where only a fraction appears on the websites, mostly in highly truncated form. And an archive’s lifespan is measured in weeks and months, not years. Sankei is the only Japanese MSM outlet going in the other direction, through its visually clunky but bounteous website in collaboration with MSN. You know, you should do a story about this. Yes, you. I know you’re reading this…

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