the death of fairfax, page-21

newieboy,

$1 a day is not an excessive price to keep yourself abreast of the world around you. I don't know how old you are - but once you reach a certain age, keeping tab of what's happening around you becomes important. The value of being kept informed I would say, would be worth well over $1 a day.

The price may seem excessive if you are used to reading news for free - but this isn't America where you've got heaps of choices of news outlets to go to, which makes it extremely difficult to charge any amount for their news, since customers will just go elsewhere. In Australia, not dissimilar to banking and supermarkets, there's only really only 2 newspapers to get your news from. Since now both the two major newspaper publishers in the country have erected paywalls, you don't have a choice of not paying for news - you can't just pick up another newspaper for your news.

I just find it very hard to see how 99 out of 100 Australians would rather go blind, choosing to bypass regular updates on events that affect their jobs, their loved ones, their investments, etc, than pay $1 a day. That's not how the human psyche works.

Brisbane Times has been in QLD for a while now, yes, but I don't believe Fairfax has made any serious attempt at establishing it as an alternative to the Murdoch papers. The coverage of local and state news is nowhere near as comprehensive as the SMH. It's not a viable alternative to the Courier Mail if they only have 1/10th of the content that the Courier Mail carries. However I believe once they've established that a paywall works, they will be much more willing to ramp up resources allocated to a QLD news service, making it a real alternative to the CM.