Frank Rich?

Technorati has a top search display on their home page, showing what’s hot and popular searches. Over the last week, a name kept making it onto the top search and tag cloud list, Frank Rich. Never heard of him. No clue about who he is or what he does. Finally curiosity got the best of me and I did a Google search on the name. Turns out that he is a columnist for the New York Times, so I think, “ok, what is he writing about that has gotten everybody talking?” I clicked to the New York Times index for him and received a list of his articles. Nothing too fancy or great that I could tell from the titles, so I went to click on an article to see what the buzz was about. Here’s the brilliant part. I can’t read the article. I can either purchase a single article for $4.95 or I can upgrade to TimesSelect where I can view 100 articles from the New York Times archive for $7.95 per month.

Newspapers On Their Last Leg

Paper circulation is down. Readers are flocking to either television news (CNN or FoxNews) or the Internet for their daily dose of news. Electronic news outlets can respond instantly; they don’t have to wait for the presses to print out thousands of copies of paper. Also, how environmentally friendly are the newspaper companies anyway? If a paper gets read, or not, a tree still died somewhere. Recycle you say? Somewhere, sometime, a tree still died. On the net, if no one reads your post, nothing happens. The data is archived somewhere; no harm no foul.

No wonder print media is in trouble. Where else on the Internet can you find a news media that wants you to pay to reach the news? And this isn’t even news. Frank Rich is a columnist for the Arts and Culture Desk at the Times; he covers American Politics and Popular Culture. Its not like he covers breaking news. He reports and gives his opinion on events. So really he’s just a pre-Internet blogger without a blog. What blogger do you know of that could charge readers to read his posts?

Blogger Network

It’s not fair to say that Frank Rich is charging to have readers pay to read his articles on-line. That’s all at the New York Times door. The closest comparison on the Internet to what the New York Times does is a blogger’s network. A blogger’s network is an online business where a series of interrelated blogs have been bound together to form what could be called a super blog. Either the individual bloggers have grouped together and share in the work and profits to make the network successful, or someone owns the blogger network and the actual writers of the blog are paid to blog. On a successful network, a share of the profits could make someone a nice chunk of change along with added incentive to work and make the network more successful. On the other hand, there is something to be said about knowing exactly how much you are going to get paid; writing 1 post per day, 5 days per week and getting paid $500 for the month no matter how well the network is doing gives some security. I wouldn’t call it smart, to not worry about how successful the network is doing as long as you get paid, but some people just want to make sure they get theirs.

This post was written by Shawn of DestyOnline.com - Assisting bloggers with their online business.