I don't understand why most news sources aren't non-profit to begin with. The reason they struggle so much is that they're all trying to run a huge profit to pay off their shareholders.

There's no restriction in non-profits that they can't make money and pay people ridiculous wages. I mean IIRC Oxfam in the UK paid like £400,000 (probably near $800,000 at the time) for a marketing firm to do an advert. It's just the company doesn't get taxed, so long as all the 'surplus' goes back into improving the business, however all their workers can still earn an income and will still pay income taxes.

I mean imagine how many people would buy a newspaper subscription if you got a tax receipt from it!

Do you have a startup? Why isn't it not-for-profit?

Oh yeah. You want to get rich. Not "well off" but rich.

Question answered.

The people who start and run newspapers are NOT the same kind of people who want to be reporter when they grow up. One of the fun aspects of the whole "save the newspaper" conversation is that the loudest people in it, the reporters and editors who appear to be at the center of it, are in fact marginal players in the game and quite possibly have little idea what they're talking about.

How many editorials and op-eds do we see from the people who run the ad sales teams? From publishers? Very, very, very few. What does a beat reporter know about saving their newspaper? How many business reporters have actually ever run or started their own business?

> I mean imagine how many people would buy a newspaper subscription if you got a tax receipt from it!

You can't get a tax receipt for "services received".

That's correct. Nonprofits can sell products and use the revenues to grow, but the fee paid for the products is not a tax deductible donation.

You could call this the NPR/PBS model. They create some interesting news programming as non-profits. (And of course the BBC, and probably numerous equivalents in other countries.)

Is there something about newspapers that makes the non-profit model not work as well as it does for broadcast?

This is so obvious it hurts. Another thing: why is the NYT for example unable to monetize it's huge traffic? I don't get this. There are people getting rich with a lot less traffic to their sites.

Newspaper people are dinosaurs. Working in a newsroom like is like stepping into a time warp and they just don't understand the evolution of technology. So they're too busy applying the 'old' way of doing things to something that's radically different. So they lose.

This is a really good question- I wonder the same thing about Facebook.

People don't click on the links.

When your looking at NYT or Facebook you are interested in their content when you using Google your looking for something. Put another way, how effective would advertising be when inserted in the middle of a phone conversation?

Inserting advertising into a phone conversation would ruin the experience (more so than an ad on a website). But it would probably be noticed!

You are probably right to an extent- but a lot of times people are browsing FB to waste time. If they are looking at the profile of some girl they like, and an ad shows up for the new album of one of the bands she likes- could that not potentially be an effective ad? (This could be a friend, who has a birthday coming up, and FB could suggest presents based on your friends preferences). I really think that FB just needs to adapt their ads better. I hope they get it figured out and prove everyone that thinks they aren't worth 15 billion wrong!

TC vs NYT vs Economist is this really one continuum with two extremes, with NYT in the "middle ground"?

It could be middle ground in terms of penmanship, but neither TC nor Economist can be a daily news source. Daily, with general relevance. Different function IMHO.

Do we need daily news sources of any sophistication? The New York Times reports the happenings of the previous day with a bunch of pseudo-analysis. I'm fine with just a plain statement of facts from cable news networks or the AP. Then I can get my in-depth discussion with a weekly delay from a publication like The Economist, which has more meaningful analysis in a single issue than the entire history of the Times.

Why do I need the middle ground?

I don't see it as a middle ground. I see it as a genre of news. You may not need daily news with any analysis, but that still doesn't put NYT on the same continuum as TechCrunch and the Economist.

Granted, Economist is probably closer to NYT, in terms of scope, but I still don't see how NYT sits between the two as the optional "middle ground."