Newspaper Digital Editions Growing
from the no-dirty-hands dept
While plenty of young people won’t even take free subscriptions to the paper editions of newspapers, apparently digital editions of papers are seeing growing success. Almost a quarter of US daily papers offer these electronic versions of the hard copy paper, and regional UK papers are increasingly turning to them since one vendor says they can be produced for as little as 100 pounds per edition. Investor’s Business Daily says a fifth of its total subscribers, or 47,000 people, pay $235 per year for its digital edition, giving a healthy bump to its bottom line. While newspapers struggle with their growing irrelevance, the health of digital editions points that there’s some life left in newspapers yet — maybe just not in print editions. People still like to read papers, but the standard printed broadsheet is quickly falling out of favor (witness the jump in sales from broadsheet papers switching to tabloid formats), and too often web editions are poorly executed imitations of the print version, often not featuring complete content or annoying registration systems. If people want to read the paper online, and are willing to pay to avoid Web editions, what’s that say about the papers’ online presences?
