WashingtonPost.com Editor: No Plans To Charge

The question of charging for a “PostSelect” came up during an online chat with Jim Brady, editor of WashingtonPost.com since last November. “At this time, there are no plans to charge users for the site. We always reserve the right to revisit that strategy, but for now, there are no plans,” Brady told a reader raving about how much he/she likes the online Post.
It wasn’t all roses … Brady fielded complaints about the Post’s search engine — a rebuild is in the works — and pop-up ads. He said of the latter, “part of the tradeoff for keeping the site free is that we do need to make money via advertising. Understand the concern that, as a newspaper subscriber, you should get an ad-free site, but we don’t have a site like that right now, and it would be a substantial task to create one.”

On citizen journalism: “Can’t tell you when, but we’re working on a handful of other ways to engage users, and among them is allowing for submission of content from outside sources. But there are a lot of details to be worked out before we’re ready to go live.”

Competition from aggregators like Yahoo: “The big question is whether the original news organizations will continue to do distribution deals with the aggregators. Those deals cut both ways for the original news creators. Obviously, the aggregators are making some moves to create their own content, and the success or failure of those enterprises will probably be telling.”

Print’s future: “I don’t see printed newspapers going away at any time.”
(via Romenesko)

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