The Media Drop

On Thursday, Channelnewsasia.com featured an article by Choo Ai Leng about the shift of readership in some markets, many American, from paid daily papers to free “commuter” daily papers. Most prominent in the piece is the presence of Tribune Company as a participant in the free daily market, along with their own regular daily publications in multiple cities. This shouldn’t be ignored, because just as the New York Times Company has been working on their purchase of Metro Boston of late, Tribune has amNew York in NYC and RedEye in Chicago.

For some time people have been aware that the younger set is “used to” free content, being the Internet “early” adopters that they are. So it’s not overly surprising to see people curious, even internationally, about a shift towards more free offline content as well. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to how much of a newspaper’s revenue comes from the individual subscriber or newstand sale, but it’s not the majority of the monies coming in - hence advertising. It’d be interesting to see how many publications could exist without losing too much news (though shortening their column inches, surely) and ditching a daily cost altogether.